Links 16.2024
On a Personal Note
Okay people, is social media dead? While I had an abundance of good material to pick from to fill up this week’s edition, I noticed that none of these recommendations came from social media. I even struggled to find good memes. That made me think.
Because for the last couple of years, I see the following trend: I haven’t joined any new platform, I never used TikTok, I despise LinkedIn, I deleted Facebook, I barely tweet (i.e. only shitpost), and I use instagram only for personal stuff. Instead, I followed more newsletters than ever, cherished my group chats, and even started to re-subscribe to some high-quality journalism. History is cyclical after all.
Of course, this isn’t a groundbreaking observation. Ian Bogost predicted this years ago. It just struck me while writing this. Don’t call me a boomer!
My desperation ran so deep that I even included this weird Taylor Swift x Aristotle crossover in the meme section. But on the other hand, it is also quite telling that Taylor picked the most mid philosophical reference there is. She didn’t dare to go with Heidegger, Hume, or Rawls? That’s why Hegelian Britney is so superior.
Are Human Rights Universal?
When I read this essay, I couldn’t believe that it was written more than 23 years ago! It feels too prophetic, too important, and almost uncannily timely. What we see is that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have given rise to a new alliance of anti-universalists: The populists, the New Left (that turned postmodernism into an intellectual bestiality) as well as the Nicaraguas and South Africas of the world that claim to speak on behalf of Global South and its cultural exceptionalism. They accuse the West of selectively applying the idea of human rights—particularly in the conflicts mentioned above. And what does the West do? It plays along by undermining the global liberal order itself (Germany, I am looking at you!). It is, once again, the decadence of liberals that continues to haunt us. The last paragraph was a warning that we didn’t listen to. And because it is so quintessential this newsletter, it deserves a separate quote:
This, then, is a wake-up call. Waging this war of ideas successfully—and it cannot be evaded or postponed for long—will require intellectual rearmament for thinkers lulled by the warm, fuzzy triumph of liberalism and the supposed end of ideology.
Read the whole thing. We need a 2024 version of this! And we all know who the Walzers and Sandels of our time are…
Although huge differences in degree do exist between repression in Afghanistan and executions in Florida, the point is that the arguments of Islamic extremists parallel those used by U.S. courts and politicians: namely, that states have a sovereign right to be let alone and not be judged by international human rights standards. The United States insists, for example, on the right to execute persons who committed crimes as minors. Never mind that this violates U.S. obligations under the ICCPR. It is the American way, representing American values and ethics.
Such assertions are made nowadays by many varieties of cultural exceptionalists. For most of the 55 years since the collapse of Hitler’s own extravagant form of cultural exceptionalism, this sort of claim tended to be suppressed, or at least muted. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the several ensuing legal treaties setting out civil, political, cultural, and economic rights as well as the rights of children, women, ethnic groups, and religions, were meant to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all persons, everywhere. Although these legal instruments allow some restrictions in time of national emergency, they brook no cultural exceptionalism.
But more and more, such universalist claims are being challenged. And so the argument must be joined: are human rights truly universal, or are they a product of the decadent West that has no relevance in other societies?
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[Kofi] Annan called for a redefinition of national interests that will “induce states to find far greater unity in the pursuit of such basic [U.N.] Charter values as democracy, pluralism, human rights, and the rule of law.”
This bold call drew quite a hostile reaction from member states. Governments seeking to preserve their sovereignty, however, are not the only ones offended by this most recent call for the enforcement of global values. Some cultures perceive the global human rights canon as a threat to their very identity. The Taliban may brandish national sovereignty as a shield, but they also see themselves as militant guardians of a religion and culture that should be exempted from a “Western” system of human rights that is inimical to Islam as they practice it. Other governments, notably Singapore’s, have similarly advanced their claim of exceptionalism by referring to “Asian values” that are supposedly antithetical to universal or Western norms.
In taking a stand against global human rights, the Taliban have made common cause not with the tired nationalist defenders of state sovereignty, but with a powerful and growing subset of cultural exceptionalists. These include some traditional indigenous tribes, theocratic national regimes, fundamentalists of many religions, and surprisingly, a mixed bag of Western intellectuals who deplore the emphasis placed by modern human rights rhetoric on individual autonomy. Although these exceptionalists have little else in common, they share an antipathy for the whole human rights system: the treaties, intergovernmental assemblies, councils, committees, commissions, rapporteurs of the secretary-general, and the supporting coterie of nongovernmental organizations (NGOS), each seeking to advance the cause of personal self-determination and individual rights. The exceptionalists view this system as corrosive of social cohesion and a solvent of community, eroding the social customs and traditions that become unsustainable once the individual ceases to be subordinate to the group.
Although the struggle for human rights as seen through the prism of, say, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch looks like a tug of war between governments and individual dissidents, the real action has moved elsewhere: to the battle lines between the forces of communitarian conformity and the growing network of free-thinking, autonomy-asserting individualists everywhere. And although a physical struggle is undoubtedly occurring for control of Chechnya’s hills, the Khyber Pass, and the White Nile, a crucial intellectual struggle is also being waged between the forces of Lockian individual liberty and those championing communitarian values.
The communitarian argument is well paraphrased by professor Adeno Addis of Tulane University: “One cannot have a right as an abstract individual. Rather, one has a right as a member of a particular group and tradition within a given context.” To this Princeton’s Michael Walzer adds that the recent emphasis on individual rights has fostered a “concept of self that is normatively undesirable” because it “generates a radical individualism and then a radical competition among self-seeking individuals.” This, Addis asserts, “breeds social dislocation and social pathology among members of the group.”
Harvard professor Michael Sandel, in his recent book Democracy’s Discontent, criticizes the accommodations made by U.S. law—judge-made law, in particular—to an ethos of individual rights that, he claims, undermines the civic virtues that sustain Americans’ sense of communal responsibility. Sandel complains that the emphasis placed on individualism in recent years has neutered the state and elevated personal rights above the common good. At the international level, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad espouses a variation on the same theme. In 1997, he urged the U.N. to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights by revising or, better, repealing it, because its human rights norms focus excessively on individual rights while neglecting the rights of society and the common good. Meanwhile, Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has dismissed the declaration as reflecting only the views of the Northern and Eurocentric states that, when the declaration was adopted in 1948, dominated the General Assembly. Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, too, says that the declaration reflects “the philosophical and cultural background of its Western drafters” and has called for a new “balance” between “the notions of freedom and of responsibility” because the “concept of rights can itself be abused and lead to anarchy.”
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The argument against this cultural relativism weaves together three strands. The first demonstrates that those advancing the exceptionalist claim do not genuinely and legitimately represent those on whose behalf that claim is made. The second shows that human rights are grounded not in a regional culture but in modern transcultural social, economic, and scientific developments. And the third maintains that individual rights are not the enemy of the common good, social responsibility, and community but rather contribute to the emergence of new, multilayered, and voluntary affiliations that can supplement those long imposed by tradition, territory, and genetics.
First, the matter of exceptionalist legitimacy—or the lack thereof. Many prominent voices in non-Western societies reject the claims of exceptionalists who supposedly speak for them. Sri Lanka’s president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, points out that “the free market has become universal, and it implies democracy and human rights.” She dismisses talk about “a conflict of values” as “an excuse that can be used to cover a multitude of sins.” Dato’ Param Cumaraswamy, the former chair of the Malaysian Bar Council and a U.N. special rapporteur on the independence of judges, points to widespread non-Western ratification of human rights treaties as proof of their “universal acceptance.” Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali bluntly states that there “is no one set of European rights, and another of African rights. . . . They belong inherently to each person, each individual.”
How, then, does one explain the increasing frequency and vehemence of exceptionalist claims made on behalf of culturally specific “values?” It often turns out that oppressive practices defended by leaders of a culture, far from being pedigreed, are little more than the current self-interested preferences of a power elite. If Afghan women were given a chance at equality, would they freely choose subordination as an expression of unique community values? We are unlikely to find out.
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In a similar fashion, many of the exceptionalist claims made in the name of cultural diversity have been challenged by others in the non-Western world. Radhika Coomaraswami, the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women, says that practices such as female genital mutilation, flogging, stoning, and amputation of limbs, as well as laws restricting women’s rights to marriage, divorce, maintenance, and custody, are all inauthentic perversions of various religious dogmas. Moreover, she insists that “cultural diversity should be celebrated only if those enjoying their cultural attributes are doing so voluntarily.” In her landmark study of Islam and human rights, Professor Ann Elizabeth Mayer concludes that much of the pedigree claimed by fundamentalists does “not represent the result of rigorous, scholarly analysis of Islamic sources or a coherent approach to Islamic jurisprudence.” The Egyptian art historian Professor Nasr Abu-Zaid puts it simply: “It is the militants who are . . . hijacking Islam.”
Just as many of the idiosyncratic customs that alienate non-Western traditionalists from the human rights system are inauthentic, so too are the attempts to portray these rights as aspects of Western cultural imperialism. The human rights canon is full of rules that, far from being deeply rooted in Western culture, are actually the products of recent developments—industrialization, urbanization, the communications and information revolutions—that are replicable anywhere, even if they have not occurred everywhere at once. They are hardly Western; if examined historically, traditional Western culture comes to look more like everyone else’s zealous fundamentalism. Look closely through this lens, and even the Taliban begin to seem “Western” in their practices. Alcibiades, a commander of the Athenian army, was condemned to death for impiety in 415 B.C., as was Socrates years later. And remember that stoning for blasphemy is recommended by the Old Testament (Leviticus 24: 16).
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Modern human rights-based claims to individual autonomy arise primarily not out of opposition to community, but from the desires of modern persons to use intellectual and technological innovations to supplement their continued traditional ties with genetically and geographically based communities. Liberated from predetermined definitions of racial, religious, and national identities, people still tend to choose to belong to groups. This threatens the state and the traditional group only to the extent that traditional communities are no longer able, alone, to resolve some of the most difficult global problems facing humanity: epidemics, trade flows, environmental degradation, or global warming. Few quarrel with Aristotle’s observation that “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a God.” But many, freed to do so, now define themselves, at least in part, as “new communitarians,” seeking additional transnational forums of association.
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It appears, then, that the globalization of human rights and personal freedoms is rarely an affront to any legitimate interest in cultural self-preservation. Nor do human rights represent Western cultural imperialism; instead, they are the consequence of modernizing forces that are not culturally specific. And the social consequences of expanding human rights have been far more benign than traditional communitarians have feared. To the Taliban’s claim of cultural exceptionalism one might more specifically reply, first, that the Taliban’s interpretation of the culture they claim to defend is considered incorrect by most Islamic historians and theologians; second, that their claim to speak on behalf of Afghan culture is undermined by their silencing of half the population; third, that the force of individual rights is becoming irresistible in a world of globalizing fiscal, commercial, cultural, and informational forces; and fourth, that many persons freed to choose their own identities will still decide to affiliate along religious, cultural, and national lines.
These arguments are unlikely to carry weight, however, with those whose claim of cultural exceptionalism is only a flimsy disguise for totalitarian tendencies. To some, the problem with freedom is not cultural or social, but political. After the recent victory of reformists in the Iranian parliamentary elections, for example, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi reportedly said that the victorious reformers were more dangerous to the system than a military coup because they promote greater freedom for Iranians to write, read, and behave as they wish. Such an argument is hard to refute. It will be overcome, eventually, by the irresistible forces of modernization and the demands for personal freedom those forces unleash. Meanwhile, however, it is essential to defend the universality of human rights and expose and oppose cultural exceptionalism’s self-serving fallacies.
But why bother? If the global triumph of human rights truly is predestined, encoded in the genome of scientific and technological progress, why not simply await the inevitable? One answer is that waiting is immoral. In the short run, scientific and technological progress may actually strengthen the hand of oppression. For women in Afghanistan, Kurds in Iraq, Indians in Fiji, and others, their inevitable liberation is still far away and provides scant comfort.
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This process will not be easy, for when it comes to global human rights norms, even some U.S. politicians, judges, and intellectuals are quite skeptical of universalism. And a superficial but subtly effective nexus joins the cause of cultural exceptionalism and other forms of resentment against globalization and its alleged parent: Western, or U.S., hegemony. For example, it is not always readily apparent to people why, if France claims the right to protect its culturally unique movie industry, Afghanistan should not protect its policy on women. Leaders of liberal societies everywhere—political, intellectual, industrial—are being challenged to defend values and clarify distinctions they may have assumed were self-evident.
If the fight against cultural exceptionalism is to be made effective, it needs military and fiscal resources. It needs a common strategy involving governments, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, business, and labor. But let there be no mistake: the fight is essentially one between powerful ideas, the kind that shake the pillars of history. It is a deadly earnest conflict between an imagined world in which each person is free to pursue his or her individual potential and one in which persons must derive their identities and meanings exclusively in accordance with immutable factors: genetics, territoriality, and culture.
This, then, is a wake-up call. Waging this war of ideas successfully—and it cannot be evaded or postponed for long—will require intellectual rearmament for thinkers lulled by the warm, fuzzy triumph of liberalism and the supposed end of ideology.
What Is a Just War?
In a true dialectical manner, I’m now linking to an interview with the very person that I just accused of undermining the idea of universal human rights: Michael Walzer. Yet, whatever we say about the illiberal implications of Walzer’s communitarianism, he remains the canonical voice on just war theory. And so, I was intrigued to see him featured in the German newspaper Die Zeit—where he was interviewed about the moral status of Israel’s war against Hamas. I extracted some of the most interesting parts; but I recommend reading the whole interview because it is important to understand Walzer’s very own personal background here, I suppose.
Needless to say, this isn’t an endorsement of Walzer’s view. My own assessment naturally differs from that of Walzer. That might be because I see some of his communitarian ideals having influenced Israeli politics…for the worse. And so, I would have liked it if Paul (Middelhoff), the journalist conducting the interview and somebody that I know from my seminars, was pressing him on that.
ZEITmagazin: Professor Walzer, is Israel waging a just war against Hamas?
Michael Walzer: Yes. Of central importance, however, is the distinction between ius ad bellum, the just reason for going to war, and ius in bello, the just conduct in a war. The massacre of October 7 is a just cause for going to war; Israel obviously has the right to defend itself. However, there is much to criticize about the way Israel is waging this war.
ZEITmagazin: What characterizes a just war?
Walzer: The transfer into everyday life helps us to understand. If I am attacked on the street, I can defend myself. And whoever steps in and comes to my aid is acting just as justly. These are the two fundamental principles: self-defense and the defense of others. A third case of just war is intervention to prevent a massacre, such as when the Vietnamese ended the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia. Or what the West should have done it in Rwanda, but didn't.
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ZEITmagazin: In your research, you have looked at wars waged over the past 3,000 years. What is unique about the Israeli war against Hamas?
Walzer: There has never been a war against an underground city. This isn't talked about enough. The Viet Cong had a system of tunnels, but it was very primitive compared to Hamas. The Tunnel Rats, as the American soldiers were called back then, had to be small and thin so that they could fit into the tunnels. This is not necessary in the Hamas tunnels. What Hamas has built is an engineering marvel, over 700 kilometers of tunnels in such a small area, laid out on three levels one above the other. This completely overwhelmed the Israelis. The fact that they dropped all those 2000-pound bombs on Gaza that caused such destruction also has something to do with this: They wanted to hit the tunnels but had little success. The network is too deep in the ground. In this respect, this war is almost experimental.
ZEITmagazin: The Gaza Strip is also cut off on all sides, and there is no escape for the civilian population.
Walzer: The Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote in the Middle Ages: A city may only be besieged from three sides. The fourth side must remain open to allow civilians to escape and relief supplies to come in. A paradoxical sentence, it ultimately means that a besieging army is not allowed to completely surround the city. Gaza does not have this fourth, open side, because the Egyptians to the south do not want to build tent cities for the Palestinian refugees, for fear that Israel would no longer allow the displaced people to return. But a siege like the one Israel applied at the beginning of the war cannot work for yet another reason: throughout history, armies have always aimed to starve trapped enemies in order to force them to force their rulers to surrender. But Hamas doesn't care in the slightest about the suffering of the civilian population. Therefore, this action by the Israelis was a political and strategic as well as a moral mistake.
ZEITmagazin: The secretary general of the United Nations recently accused Israel of using "hunger as a weapon of war," the humanitarian situation is devastating, and the population is facing famine. How do you view this development?
Walzer: Israel started this war without making any provision for the care of the civilian population. The leadership probably thought that Hamas or humanitarian organizations would take care of the people. For many Israelis, after the events of October 7th, it simply wasn't that important. But the humanitarian organizations are dependent on help coming across the border, and the Israeli side was very hesitant in allowing the deliveries to pass through. Elements of the right-wing extremist camp wanted to actively stop the deliveries. That this government is incompetent and amoral is nothing new. But there should have been people in the army who knew how devastating such an approach would be for the country's external image. Now, Israel is being blamed for the humanitarian situation, and to some extent it is responsible.
ZEITmagazin: The heavy bombing of the Gaza Strip is being compared to the bombing attacks on Dresden, Aleppo and Grozny. Is that fair?
Walzer: In Dresden, the Allies' goal was to create a firestorm in which as many people as possible would die. There were hardly any relevant military targets there anymore. In Hamburg and Cologne, the British bombed residential areas to make ordinary people homeless. The Israelis may not always have been careful enough in the weeks after October 7th and have apparently relaxed the criteria for accepting collateral damage relative to previous conflicts, which aimed to minimize civilian casualties. But their goal today is not to kill civilians. Otherwise, the number of victims would be much higher.
[…]
ZEITmagazin: What should be Israel’s priority from a moral point of view? Defeating Hamas? Saving the hostages? Or protecting the Palestinian civilian population?
Walzer: The goal of freeing hostages could even be compatible with improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza in that it could be the result of a negotiated ceasefire. Netanyahu's approach is a contradiction: waging the war in in this manner and wanting to save the hostages. My friends in Israel tell me that rescuing the hostages should be the top priority because it is more important for the future of the state and for solidarity among its citizens than a total victory over Hamas.
[…]
ZEITmagazin: South Africa has accused Israel at the International Court of Justice of committing genocide against the Palestinians. Is such an accusation credible?
Walzer: No. There is no genocidal intent on the Israeli side. Some members of the Israeli government want to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and relocate them. But fortunately, they are not the decisive force in government. As a first step, the court recognized the legality of this war, which was important. The judges rightly criticized statements by several Israeli politicians that are also punishable under Israeli law. And they have ordered a significant increase in humanitarian aid. All of this is understandable. It's not easy for me to say such a thing, but if there were almost 10,000 Hamas fighters among the 30,000 Palestinians killed, it’s not a bad ratio for such a war on urban terrain. In Fallujah, the ratio of civilian deaths to Iraqi militia fighters was not two to one, as in Gaza, but seven to one. What Israel is doing is not genocide.
ZEITmagazin: Parallel to the genocide proceedings against Israel, Nicaragua has accused the German federal government of aiding and abetting genocide. What do you think of those accusations?
Walzer: This is not a case of genocide, so it can't be regarded as aiding genocide. As a German citizen, you can think about whether German aid to Israel should be subject to conditions in the future. But it should not be stopped because Israel has been accused of genocide.
[…]
ZEITmagazin: Why is this war attracting so much attention from the global public? Hardly anyone is talking about the devastating fighting and tens of thousands of deaths in Sudan, in eastern Congo or, until a few months ago, in Ethiopia.
Walzer: (pauses) It has to do with the Biblical heritage that Jews, Christians and Muslims share. It has something to do with Jerusalem as the center of three religions. And it's about the historical status of Jews in the world.
ZEITmagazin: What does that mean, the historical status of Jews in the world?
Walzer: (laughs) I don’t know either. People are just very interested.
ZEITmagazin: Are you talking about anti-Semitism?
Walzer: That's part of it. But also philosemitism of the kind, for example, harbored by the evangelical right here in the U.S. In their imagination, the final battles between good and evil will take place in Israel at the end of days. That is not the love we Jews need. But it's true: In Israel everyone is watching, the whole world. In Sri Lanka, for example, the government slaughtered tens of thousands of Tamils over the course of many years. Nobody was interested or told them to stop. Nobody called for a ceasefire.
[…]
ZEITmagazin: In a recent essay, you wrote that terror is not a legitimate means of resistance. Yet the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) alliance is often seen as anti-Semitic, as are many anti-Israel demonstrations. What options do Palestinians have to resist Israeli occupation?
Walzer: There are always options. We know that there was controversy within the Irish Resistance Army and the National Liberation Front in Algeria about whether terror was the right tool. There are also Palestinian activists who adhere to the principle of nonviolence. The first Intifada, for example, was largely non-violent and effective, with the exception of a few stone-throwing incidents. There is the possibility of general strikes, of mass civil disobedience and also of political elections, at least in Israel. A unified pro-Arab movement with 20 seats in the Knesset that supports a Palestinian state: That would be an important contribution to political change.
[…]
ZEITmagazin: Are you able to assess Israel as critically as you do other countries? Or do your personal ties to the country get the in the way?
Walzer: That is certainly something I've been accused of time and again. I have maybe also felt the impulse to take a critical look at Israel's critics, in part because they often exaggerate things so much. But I have always tried to be critical of Israel myself.
One’s Better Half: Romantic Partners Function as Social Signals
Have you ever wondered why certain people so relentlessly display their romantic relationships online? Well, it’s signaling. Turns out that people think men (well, that’s what the study is about, not my fault!) with attractive partners are perceived as having higher status, relative to men with less attractive partners. In other words, an attractive partner leads to the same dynamics as luxury goods, such as watches or cars—that also try to signal desirable underlying attributes. Obviously, this explains the whole escort industry…or why even the hottest individuals get cheated on.
Abstract
Four studies tested the hypotheses that (1) romantic partners function as hard-to-fake signals of status and (2) men are concerned about signaling their status to both other men and to other women. In study 1, participants rated the status of an individual (gender remained neutral) who was described as attending a party with either a high-quality good (watch, car, mate) or a low-quality good. Participants rated the high-quality signaler as possessing more status than the low-quality signaler. Importantly, the high-quality mates functioned similarly to other high-quality material goods. In study 2, participants rated the status, niceness, and competence of men with high-quality mates and similarly described me with low-quality mates. Participants consistently rated the men with high-quality mates as possessing more status than similarly described men with low-quality mates. In study 3, we had only men rate that status of men with high-quality, average-quality, and low-quality mates. Men consistently rated other men with high-quality mates as possessing more status than similarly described men with low-quality mates. Finally, in study 4, we tested whether men signal high-quality mates predominantly to other men or to other women. Results supported the hypothesis that men are more concerned about signaling the quality of their mate to other men than to other women. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.
Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher
Finally, some utility-maximizing behavior from the Future of Humanity Institute <3
Joking aside, I’ve trashed Bostrom, the FHI, and the effective altruists on this platform since 2016; however, this ain’t good news. I think there needs to be such spaces, where audacious thinking and research is possible, in contemporary academia. Having said that and knowing some of the inner workings, I’m somewhat happy to see those people (particularly Bostrom) humbled. A shake-up was truly needed to burst this annoying bubble of false grandeur, groupthink, hybris…and deliberate sociopathy. Hopefully, they will find a tech billionaire to fund the finer parts of the institute. For Bostrom, we don’t need to be concerned in any case. He will always have his reddit following…
(Unsurprisingly, the Guardian even makes this about Elon. Rent free!)
Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. […] Еhe center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.
[…]
Bostrom resigned from Oxford following the institute’s closure, he said.
The closure of Bostrom’s center is a further blow to the effective altruism and long-termism movements that the philosopher had spent decades championing, and which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.
Bostrom – who popularized the theory that humanity may be living in a simulation, one that Musk often repeats – spoke about the closure of the institute in a lengthy final report published on its website this week. He praised the work of the center, while also saying that it faced “administrative headwinds” from Oxford and its philosophy department.
[…]
A statement on the Future of Humanity’s website claimed that Oxford had frozen fundraising and hiring in 2020, and that in late 2023 the faculty of philosophy decided to not renew the contracts of remaining staff at the institute.
An Oxford University spokesman said: “We regularly consider the best structures for conducting our academic research, as part of the university’s governance processes. After such consideration, the decision was made to close the Future of Humanity Institute. The university recognises the Institute’s important contribution to this emerging field, which researchers elsewhere across the university are likely to continue.”
Effective altruism, the utilitarian belief that people should focus their lives and resources on maximizing the amount of global good they can do, has become a heavily promoted philosophy in recent years. The philosophers at the center of it, such as Oxford professor William MacAskill, also became the subject of immense amounts of news coverage and glossy magazine profiles. One of the movement’s biggest backers was Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-disgraced former billionaire who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
Bostrom is a proponent of the related long-termism movement, which held that humanity should concern itself mostly with long-term existential threats to its existence such as AI and space travel. Critics of long-termism tend to argue that the movement applies an extreme calculus to the world that disregards tangible current problems, such as climate change and poverty, and veers into authoritarian ideas. In one paper, Bostrom proposed the concept of a universally worn “freedom tag” that would constantly surveil individuals using AI and relate any suspicious activity to a police force that could arrest them for threatening humanity. [SG: Okay, even I would say that this is an uncharitable reading]
[…]
The past few years have been tumultuous for effective altruism, however, as Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar fraud marred the movement and spurred accusations that its leaders ignored warnings about his conduct. Concerns over effective altruism being used to whitewash the reputation of Bankman-Fried, and questions over what good effective altruist organizations are actually doing, proliferated in the years since his downfall.
Meanwhile, Bostrom’s email from the 1990s resurfaced last year and resulted in him issuing a statement repudiating his racist remarks and clarifying his views on subjects such as eugenics. Some of his answers – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to further criticism from fellow academics that he was being evasive.
Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’
One of my “Golden Rules for Life” (I published those before I started to archive my newsletters, let me know whether I should resurface them) has always been: “Be a regular at a few places.” Because, as a true Laschian, I believe in the power of ‘Third Places’—where all social classes blend (just think about the democratizing nature of a football stadium) and (most underrated-ly!) where we take breaks from ‘private leisure’.
So, here is my hot take: The general unhappiness with relationships (i.e. divorce rates) stems less from the obvious narrative of “the temptation of more available options”; but rather roots in the Disney-fication of our partners—who now have to be soulmates and involved in all aspects of our lives. As a consequence, we eradicated the casual (i.e. unstructured) hangouts where partners pursue their different interests outside their shared space…and substituted them with “date nights” (don’t get me started!) that often even take place at home. In my books, that is terrible. Even the most amazing person turns annoying when we are exposed to them 24/7. That’s just the law of diminishing marginal returns. But I digress. ‘Third Places’ are important and amazing. I mean, I’m writing this while sitting in a café—just having had a random chat with my friend Hussam (s/o!). To break out of this sociopathic cultural moment where we need “conversation cards” to artificially structure any interaction with another human being, we need to bring back those ‘Third Places’…and make people read articles, such as this one:
On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. One of the nondescript stucco houses had a curious sticker on its mailbox reading mac’s club. I checked Google Maps to see if I was standing next to a cleverly disguised business—what might pretentiously be referred to in a city as a speakeasy—but nothing popped up, so I peeked inside the house. That’s where I spotted a pool table and a middle-aged guy sitting at the end of a long, mahogany bar, drinking a Bloody Mary by himself. Apparently I’d stumbled upon a social club meant for residents of the neighborhood. Though at first the bartender was incredulous that I’d just walked in, he soon rewarded my sense of adventure with a Guinness on the house. The Eagles weren’t playing in the NFL that day, and he was grateful for the additional company. We talked about the upcoming deer season, and upon learning that I was a new hunter, the two guys showed me a rifle that was kept in another room.
On the train back to Philadelphia, where I was living at the time, I felt much more euphoric about the unexpected hangout than I did about the supposedly spiritual experience that had preceded it. To me, the ideal hangout has a few components: spontaneity, purposelessness, and a willingness among all parties involved to go wherever the conversation leads them. This one met all the criteria. Two strangers took a chance on spending an hour with an outsider—a tiny woman of ambiguous age who is sometimes told she resembles the Disney character Spinelli—who was enticed by a simple sign. They had no reason to expect we would share common ground. But we managed to have a perfect, no-stakes interaction after two years in which many people haven’t taken a chance on anybody.
Besides giving me the feeling that I’d flexed a muscle that had atrophied, the interaction was special to me because I’d found a classic “third place” in the suburbs, where I least expected it. The term, which was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, essentially refers to a physical location other than work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity. The historical examples that Oldenburg cites in his book The Great Good Place include French cafés, German American beer gardens, and English pubs, all of which appeal to people from various walks of life.
In my early 20s, I was unacquainted with the term third place, though the hope of someday becoming a regular at one was the primary reason I moved from the Florida suburbs to New York City. After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters—as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, “The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe, and relatively unexciting suburbs. I spent most of my teenage years listening to whiny guitar-based music that drove home that exact point.
But these days, the art of hanging out seems to be waning in cities. The American Community Life Survey reported last year that only 25 percent of people living in areas with “very high” amenity access—close to grocery stores, gyms, bowling alleys, and other ideal sites of chance encounters—actually socialize with strangers at least once a week. In 2019, about two-thirds of Americans said they had a favorite local place they went to regularly. That two-thirds has since dropped to a little more than half, according to the survey.
[…]
Rich Heyman, an American-studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin, sees what’s happened during the COVID era as the continuation of a trend that began in the middle of the 20th century. When city dwellers were largely confined to crowded tenements, they were forced out into the world, which often meant hanging out with strangers in taverns. But as time went on, leisure became privatized. Living conditions improved; people chose to sit with their nuclear families in front of the television. This is similar to the diagnosis of modern American life that Robert Putnam put forth in his seminal work, Bowling Alone, though Heyman notes that the problem has been exacerbated since the book came out in 2000. Today people frequently spend their leisure time in solitude with their personal screens. “Now we have on-demand streaming, and social media, which are further extensions of that fundamental shift,” he told me.
[…]
So what’s replaced hangouts in the city? In many cases, I’d consider them ersatz third places: establishments that are either too expensive for the average American or apparently designed to disincentivize lingering. Think carefully curated faux dive bars that serve $15 beer-and-shot specials, or parks like New York’s High Line that are built to be moved through in a linear fashion. Meanwhile, the ground between the third place and the office—what Oldenburg called the “second place”—is murky. Co-working spaces and corporate amenities such as employee-only coffee shops tap the aesthetics and function of a café—plush seating, the availability of caffeine—to insidiously extract more productivity from workers. In these privatized third places, there is an expectation that all conversation will be centered on work. There is the underlying anxiety of being on the clock—the antithesis of just hanging out. And the possibility of a wildly unexpected encounter is slim given that most people in attendance will be in roughly the same socioeconomic stratum because they work in similar jobs.
The ersatz third place is a consequence of a culture obsessed with productivity and status, whose subjects might have decent incomes but little recreational time. Urban-dwelling Americans, however, tend to place work at the center of life in part because cities are so expensive to live in. They might work 50-hour weeks to survive, leaving little to no time for leisure and community engagement. Unstructured quality time with friends is replaced with a scheduled series of continuous catch-ups. Subsequently, these overscheduled people lack meaningful ties with their neighbors, and so they patronize spaces to make those connections even less frequently.
Kathy Giuffre, a professor at Colorado College who studies third places, told me that a real third place can also contain an element of casual social aid. “You can get a shoulder to cry on via your best friend, but sometimes you need someone to lend you a cup of sugar, and that’s about proximity,” she told me. “You just need someone to watch your dog for five minutes while you run into a store or something.” Ultimately, she said, a world made up of atomized, physically isolated people is a world without a true shared reality—which is a recipe for civic disengagement, misinformation, and perhaps even political extremism.
Maybe to drive home her point about the lack of third places in the United States, Giuffre said that she’s in the process of moving to a Tuscan village and plans to spend her retirement sitting in a café with old men, playing dominos. But for people who don’t have the resources to move to Europe in search of a pure third place—such as myself—she offered a bit of advice: “Socializing is a learned skill, but the last time we learned it we were probably little kids. So be kind to yourself, because you might be out of practice.”
Peace,
SG