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Pilgrims, Refugees, and Gratitude: Thanksgiving Thoughts

Thanksgiving is a day inspired by a group of refugees – the Pilgrims. It is hard for me to heap admiration on the Pilgrims. They were a group escaping from England to achieve their own religious freedom. But they persecuted those who did not follow their own crabbed version. Harold Meyerson today has an excellent Washington Post column (see here) in which he draws attention to the irony that Republicans on a day inspired by refugees are doing their best to deport immigrants and prevent refugees from arriving on their shores. Narrow as the religion of the Pilgrims might have been, it was not a religion of personal fear in this world and certainly not a religion of selfishness.

Nonetheless, I am even more drawn to E.J. Dionne’s wonderful column today. See here. Thanksgiving is a day for gratitude. And he says that “Gratitude requires the swift, the strong, the wise, the wealthy, the brilliant and the learned (or those whom the world recognizes as such) to beware of their temptation to arrogance. No matter how hard we might have toiled or how much we might have struggled, the bounty we enjoy is inescapably linked to unearned blessings.” He also recognizes that those who are not among the privileged are the most likely to display the virtue of gratitude – gratitude for life itself and all the blessings it brings. Avoiding arrogance, I think, requires the recognition that the poor among us are for the most part not there because they are lazy or undeserving (there, for example, was not an epidemic of laziness in 2008), but for a variety of reasons ranging from the structure of the economy to aspects of personal health.

It requires the recognition that when we demonize others (as I did in the first paragraph) that human beings cannot be reduced to their worst aspect or actions and that we ourselves are not without serious fault. It requires us to forgive others, but also to cultivate the ability to forgive ourselves.

On Gratitude: Thoughts, Maxims & Proverbs for Thanksgiving

“Giving Thanks,” Horace Pippin (1942)

“Enough is as good as a feast.”—Sir Thomas Malory (d.1471)

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”—John Heywood (c.1497-1580)

“Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.”—of Spanish provenance

“When eating fruit, remember the one who planted the tree.”—of Vietnamese provenance

“ ‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.”—Alice Walker

“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.”—William Arthur Ward (1921-1994)

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”—William Arthur Ward

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”—Marcel Proust

“Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.”—Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821 – 1881)

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

“To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.”—Johannes Gaertner (1912 – 1996)

“We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”—Cicero

“Gratitude is the moral memory of mankind.”—Georg Simmel

“Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.”—John Henry Jowett

Source: http://www.wiseoldsayings.com/
“Gratitude,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

Jim Wallis on Reacting to ISIS

On her Facebook page, Taryn Mattice links to a must read post by Jim Wallis on how to react to ISIS. Among other things, he argues that the kind of measures urged by Republicans are exactly the reactions that ISIS would welcome and would assist their recruitment efforts. Wallis argues that "To win the 'war' against ISIS, we must win the moral narrative – we must reveal ISIS’s distortions and lies and thus destroy their moral and religious legitimacy to those they seek to recruit. The best way to defeat bad religion is with good religion, and the better way to defeat religious fundamentalism is from within rather than trying to smash it from without." He argues that "Continuing to supply the narrative ISIS that clearly wants – dropping more bombs, invading more countries, refusing more refugees, offering our hate in response to theirs, and 'showing no mercy' as some of our political leaders now vow – is to play directly into the hands of ISIS. Instead of that old narrative, we need to create a new one that can indeed defeat ISIS. Fear is our vulnerability. Instead, we must learn the spiritual discipline and habit of the scriptural command, BE NOT AFRAID."

He has many more wise things to say. See here.

Maxime Rodinson: “independent Marxist” & (pre-Saidian) French Orientalist

In the words of Gilbert Achcar (see below), “Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) was the last survivor of an exceptional group of French Orientalists—in the pre-Saidian non-pejorative meaning of this term, i.e. scholars of Islam and the Arab world—who lived through most of the twentieth century and rose to fame in the 1960s, a decade that saw the emergence of an impressive contingent of French thinkers whose names loom large in the social sciences of our time. The group of brilliant Orientalists to which Rodinson belonged, and which included other luminaries such as Jacque Berque and Claude Cahen, reclaimed the field of Arab and Islamic studies with impeccable erudition, scientific rigour, and a critical solidarity with the peoples they studies that made their writings largely free from the deficiencies of the colonial ‘Orientalism’ of yesteryear and their own time.”

I happen to be reading Maxime Rodinson’s work afresh after many years, having first been introduced to him by Professor Juan Campo when I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. While I still have several of his works in English from that time, I recently picked up a new edition (Zed Books, 2015) of Marxism and the Muslim World (Foreword by Gilbert Achcar), originally published in 1979 (French ed., 1972). I thought some of (the younger among) you not familiar with his work might appreciate this list of books in English by Rodinson (most of these titles were published earlier in French):

• The Arabs (London: Croom Helm, 1981)
• Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (London: Saqi Books, 1991)
• Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1988)
• Islam and Capitalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973)
• Israel and the Arabs (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, revised ed., 1982)
• Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973)
• Marxism and the Muslim World (London: Zed Books, 2015) (1979)
• Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) [I realize this biography is controversial for obvious reasons, nonetheless, it remains a sympathetic portrait from an avowed Marxist.]

The Wikipedia entry on Rodinson is here. An interview from Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) conducted by Joan Mandell and Joe Stork in 1986 is here (as noted in the interview, his parents died at Auschwitz in 1943).

On the various species of “Orientalism,” pre-Saidian and otherwise (including its role in ‘postcolonial’ and ‘subaltern’ studies), please see:

• Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
• Bilgrami, Akeel. “Reflections on Edward Said,” the final three chapters from Bilgrami’s book, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013).
• Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1988).
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
• Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007).

 

Fantasy Sports Games: A Form of Illegal Gambling?

Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, has declared that daily fantasy sports games are a form of illegal gambling, but I think his claim is spurious. Gambling is generally illegal if it is based on luck rather than skill, but the line between the two is unclear. I will focus on baseball because I know it somewhat better than other sports.

Everyone would agree that the real game of baseball is a game of skill. Try throwing a 93 mile per hour fastball or hitting one. The better teams tend to prevail over the course of a season. Yet baseball games are often decided by a matter of inches. Even the best of batters have little control over where a ball goes. To be sure a batter can deliberately hit some pitches to the right side of the infield, but nobody has the precision to hit the ball between the first and second baseman. When that occurs, it is simply a matter of luck. Many games and playoff results are decided by lucky turns of events of that sort.

Most states agree that season long fantasy baseball is not a form of illegal gambling. In fantasy baseball, owners assemble a team of current major league baseball players and they are scored on the basis of how those players (or others acquired during the season) perform in actual games.

There is skill involved. Deciding which players to acquire at the outset and later in the season depends on a lot of knowledge of the player pool, the parks in which they play, the tendencies of the managers of major league teams, an understanding of what combination of players will contribute statistics in categories needed under the scoring rules, the likelihood of injuries to particular players. In both national and local competition some people win more frequently than others. I won one of my most competitive leagues last year, and there was a lot of skill involved with a mixture of luck.  But it was the first time I have won that league in 9 years. I just have to face the fact that some in the league have more skill than I do.  

This brings us to daily leagues. There is more luck involved than in season long fantasy leagues simply because daily leagues have a far smaller sample size. Nonetheless, the same skills are needed in the daily leagues. And, let’s face it, it is not as if players participate only one day. They win or lose over time – over many daily games. There is no question that skill is rewarded. The Public Health Advocacy Institute reports that 90% of the winnings go to one per cent of the participants. See here.

To suggest that fantasy baseball is more luck than skill is unsupportable. This does not mean that daily games should be legal. Indeed, millions of participants need protection. Most participants who put down money do not realize that the pros have put in enough entries that algorithms favor their victories. The reason millions need protection is that a small percentage of participants have more skill and capital resulting in a disproportionate share of winnings. Daily games perhaps should be terminated or regulated more intensively. But Schneiderman’s claim that these games are currently illegal fails understand the importance of skill in the daily games.

Minds, Intelligence, and Human Nature

Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue (1925)

By way of distinguishing brains from minds (including the unique and irreducible properties of consciousness), AI (artificial intelligence) from human intelligence,* and human (animal) nature from animal nature simpliciter, I proffer the following titles:
• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. (I prefer the arguments of Bennett, Hacker, and Robinson over Dennett and Searle.)
• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Gillett, Grant. Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008.
• Gillett, Grant. The Mind and Its Discontents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2009.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Hodgson, David. The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Robinson, Daniel N. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.
• Travis, Charles. Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

* The provocative and important notions of “distributed” and “collective” intelligence blur these boundaries, indeed, they make artificial and human intelligence in several respects complementary; nevertheless, the former remains parasitic on the latter, much as conceptions of distributed and collective intelligence derive their meaning and referential power in the first instance from the concept of individual intelligence (which, in any case, is not ‘located’ in the brain), granted the superior “problem solving” (in the widest sense) capacity of distributed and collective intelligence (or collective wisdom). Moreover, acknowledging the power and significance of distributed and collective intelligence for, say, epistemic deliberative models of democratic theory and praxis, need not mean we abandon the explanatory tenets of methodological individualism for, as Hélène Landemore notes, “it can be argued that these notions lend themselves to explanations in terms of individual choices and actions, in the same way that collective-action problems can be accounted for by the analytical tools and individualist methodology of social choice theory.”

Addendum: I am linking to the post at New APPS that moved me, in turn, to share the above list. It is representative of the sort of stuff at the permeable boundaries between and the interstices of science and philosophy that rubs me the wrong way (hopefully, for the right reasons). Generally, I think it is emblematic of “scientism” in philosophy, as captured in this remark by Professor Carrie Figdor: “Basically, I think psychological concepts are transitioning to scientifically determined standards for proper use, leaving behind the ideal-rational-human, anthropocentric standards we now have.” In short, I would argue that “no, neurons do not have preferences” (and we can critique various metaphysical and philosophy of mind theories without resorting to ‘mental state verbs’ to describe or refer to processes that in the natural world, be it within or outside our bodies). Indeed, this particular use of psychological concepts strikes me as a crude employment of anthropomorphic language! Please see Eric Schwitzgebel’s post, “Do Neurons Literally Have Preferences?”