What is it like to be a coke-addled bat?

My limited experience discussing intro-philosophy standards with fiction writers suggests that fiction writers, as a group, are especially taken by Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Why? I think Jay McInerney might have an answer.

I had forgotten that in Bright Lights, Big City, the main character spends a night with a philosophy grad student named Vicky. The next day he loses his job, and his (former) co-workers press him for details about how and why it happened.

"I really don't even know," you say. They're wondering: Could this happen to me? and you would like to reassure them, tell them it's just you. They're trying to imagine themselves in your shoes, but it would be a tough thing to do. Last night Vicky was talking about the ineffability of inner experience. She told you to imagine what it was like to be a bat. Even if you knew what sonar was and how it worked, you could never know what it feels like to have it, or what it feels like to be a small, furry creature hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view-- the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can't imagine what it's like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.

Interesting! If it is true that the only shoes we can wear are our own, writers should worry that the entire project of fiction is threatened. If the effort writers put into characterization is to be something other than self-delusion, then writers, at least, must think they're imagining what it is like to be someone else. And if their effort is to be valuable, they might hope that readers, too, are imagining what it is like to be the character.

I suppose there's a spectrum of possible imaginative projections. An easy imaginative projection is me imagining what it would feel like to me if I were experiencing the events of a story. (Good video games exploit the easy end of the spectrum reasonably well.)

At the hopelessly difficult end of the spectrum is Nagel's bat: no one can imagine what it feels like for a bat to be a bat.

Good fiction must fall somewhere in the middle. A lot then turns on just how much middle there is. How closely must readers and characters resemble each other before readers can imagine what it is like for the character to be that character? How closely must writers resemble their characters before they can write them well?

So Nagel's paper, of all the post-war classics in philosophy of mind, really is specially relevant to fiction writers. Neat!

I was there: spy novel edition

Over the summer, Crystal and I met up with my parents in London. We stayed in the Hyde Park Rooms in Sussex Gardens, about 100 yards south of Paddington Station, a hotel that, for all I know, is the very same one described by Le Carre in the opening paragraph of part 2 of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (page 119 in my edition).

The Hotel Islay in Sussex Gardens-- where, on the day after his visit to Ascot, George Smiley under the name of Barraclough had set up his operational headquarters-- was a very quiet place, considering its position, and perfectly suited to his needs. It lay a hundred yards south of Paddington Station, one of a terrace of elderly mansions cut off from the main avenue by a line of plane trees and a parking patch. The traffic roared past it all night. But the inside, though it was a fire-bowl of clashing wallpapers and copper lampshades, was a place of extraordinary calm.

I sent that paragraph to my parents, and my dad replied, "travel makes so many dimensions of life more interesting, doesn't it," which seems to me exactly right.

(A ton of human history has unfolded on that little fleck of land. I spent two weeks walking around London, and that's all it took to cover the territory reasonably well. Novels and news stories, short stories, songs about Soho and assorted Underground stations, the little bits of history I stumble on-- Shakespeare and the Globe, Victoria, Elizabeth, Henry VIII-- in two weeks of walking I've been to those places.

A friend from college is doing graduate work at University College London and staying in a dorm around the corner from where I (and George Smiley!) stayed. In class last semester I singled out a particular piece of art for scorn. I'd seen it at the Tate Modern, and although I didn't mention that, a student later told me that she knew exactly the piece I was talking about-- she'd seen it at the Tate, too. More than the other places I've been, London is a bottleneck in the world.)

We're doomed: authorship question edition

Ads have started popping up on campus for Anonymous, a new movie advancing the stupid idea at the Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who died ten years before Shakespeare died, is the real author of Shakespeare's plays.

The authorship question has always struck me as the most pointless species of coffee-shop bullshit, given that there's no reason to think Shakespeare didn't write those plays. No reason, that is, except chauvinism: the belief that only a member of the genetic aristocracy could possibly write fine plays.

As it happens, I just read Bill Bryson's Shakespeare book last month. The final chapter is devoted to this trumped-up controversy, which he entertains and dismisses more concisely than I ever could. His discussion culminates on page 195:

[It] is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants [the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and others] with the necessary time, talent, and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare. But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so. These people must have been incredibly gifted-- to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward. The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later. Now that is genius!

What is it about the allure of conspiracy theories that makes otherwise smart people stupid?

Misguided perfectionism in R.U.R.

I'm most of the way through Capek's R.U.R., the play that coined the word "Robot." My favorite part, so far (and by far) is the long comic prologue, which occurs ten years before the main action of the play.

Among other things, it's a funny and vivid illustration of one kind of worry about perfectionist moral theories-- that is, theories that hold that we have a moral obligation to develop or perfect our human natures. A lot turns on understanding what our natures are, and the implications of perfectionist theories, if we're off target in our sketch of human perfection, can be menacing. Thus the following conversation, which conflates "ideal human" and "ideal worker" to funny and terrifying effect (p 17-18 in my Penguin Classics edition). Helena Glory is a visitor at the robot factory. Everyone else supervises some aspect of the factory's work.

HELENA: Why do you make [robots] then?
BUSMAN: Hahaha, that's a good one! Why do we make Robots!
FABRY: For work, Miss. One Robot can do the work of two-and-a-half human laborers. The human machine, Miss Glory, was hopelessly imperfect. It needed to be done away with once and for all.
BUSMAN: It was too costly.
FABRY: It was less than efficient. It couldn't keep up with modern technology. And in the second place it's great progress that... pardon.
HELENA: What?
FABRY: Forgive me. It's great progress to give birth by machine. It's faster and more convenient. Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time. And in the third place--
HELENA: Oh, stop!

I just love the line, "From a technical standpoint, the whole of childhood is pure nonsense." So true.

To be or not to be, I there's the point

I've been reading Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World As Stage. He includes this version of the opening of Hamlet's soliloquy from one of the "bad quartos," an early, published version of Hamlet presumably transcribed from the memory of someone involved in the production (p 160 in Bryson).

To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all.:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I marry there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned...

This is funny, but interesting too. We're familiar with tons and tons of phrases from the first half of the Hamlet soliloquy:

- slings and arrows
- outrageous fortune
- sea of troubles
- thousand natural shocks
- to sleep, perchance to dream
- what dreams may come
- shuffled off this mortal coil

None of those stuck in the transcriber's mind. The thing that seems to have made the biggest impression is the ratio-like series, "to die, to sleep, to sleep, to dream." Seems like a great illustration of 1) the fallibility of memory 2) the importance of word-choice 3) the fact that there is no audience but individuals with idiosyncratic psychological makeups.

The Bryson book has been a pleasure to read, though it was marketed to far too big an audience. It has nothing to say about the plays. Bryson seems totally uninterested in them. It has little to say about Shakespeare-- we hardly know anything. But it is a collection of interesting and often funny anecdotes of Shakespeare's day and subsequent Shakespeare scholarship. It's an easy way to satisfy a curiosity for historical context.

Basically, if you're looking for a book to help you get into Shakespeare, this isn't it. If you already like Shakespeare, but don't know anything beyond the text of the plays, then this provides some quick and fun context.

Rawls on Hume

Another quote forwarded me by my advisor. This is Rawls, from his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. He nails one of the many things I like so much about Hume.

A unique feature of Hume among the great moralists is that he is happy and contented with what he is. He is utterly without lament or sense of loss, with no trace of romantic anguish and self-pity. He doesn't complain against the world, a world that for him is a world without the God of religion, and the better for it.

Wilderness, school reform, and choice of metric

Another bit from A Sand County Almanac. Leopold offers an illustration of how (non-obviously) poor initial decisions about evaluative standards can lock us into a self-destructive course.

Wilderness is the home of big game. Thus one group that has long advocated for wilderness conservation is hunters. In fact, hunters and anglers were pushing for a quasi-environmentalist agenda long before there was any movement recognizable as modern environmentalism. It's because of hunters that the departments charged with tending the natural environment are Departments of Fish and Game, not Departments of Biodiversity, or some such. But the focus on quantity of big game-- on hunter satisfaction-- as the metric by which to judge the quality of wilderness areas proved self-destructive:

One of the most insidious invasions of wilderness is via predator control. It works thus: wolves and lions are cleaned out of a wilderness area in the interest of big-game management. The big-game herds (usually deer or elk) then increase to the point of overbrowsing the range. Hunters must then be encouraged to harvest the surplus, but modern hunters refuse to operate far from a car; hence a road must be built to provide access to the surplus game. Again and again, wilderness areas have been split by this process, but it still continues.

This is a good cautionary tale for the school reform movement. Choice of evaluative metric has profound effects on the thing being evaluated. It's very important, then, that your choice of metric do a good job of tracking what's actually valuable-- because a mistake in identifying what's valuable might not only miss the point, but actively contribute to the destruction of what's really valuable.

I don't think many in the reform movement think that standardized tests are testing what's actually valuable about childhood education. They think, instead, that they've settled on a reasonably good proxy for educational value that has the virtue of being objective, analyzable with familiar statistical methods, and easily comparable between schools and years. This approach is almost certainly doomed. Leopold's wilderness example shows us that we should be humble and careful in settling on metrics, even when we sincerely believe the metric tracks what's valuable. (We often make mistakes in judging what's valuable.) The school reform movement has chosen a metric it knows doesn't track what's valuable. The right attitude toward a future in which Rhee/Duncan/Obama-style standards-and-accountability reforms continue to take hold is dread.

(Leopold quote from "Wilderness." Page 191 in my edition of A Sand County Almanac.)