To give my brain a break after reading Reading in the Brain I am reading A New History of Western Philosophy. I know I should tackle The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies or Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World, but I feel that that would have taken more mental energy. Histories of Western philosophy are easier hauls since I already know the roadmap and have a conceptual armamentarium. Though if you want to read a history of Western philosophy, I recommend The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy. It’s written with more humor than most of the books on this topic! The style obviously differs from that in more academic works, but the general structure of The Truth About Everything is pretty much always recapitulated. A yellow-brick road instead of an asphalt one perhaps.
Reflecting on Western philosophy and its beginnings you always need to go back to Aristotle and Plato. The order in which I listed these two individuals despite their chronology should tell you about my bias. In a A New History of Western Philosophy the author recounts an assertion by Gilbert Ryle, people could be divided into two categories on the basis of four dichotomies: green versus blue, sweet versus savoury, cats versus dogs, Plato versus Aristotle. I suppose three out of four isn’t bad! Like Armand Leroi (see The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science) I have strong sympathies with Aristotle probably because I am a natural scientist, and in particular, a biologist. It is in the domain of biology that Aristotle was mostly wrong, as opposed to not-even-wrong, as in physics. And often he wasn’t even wrong, not too shabby for a man who lived ~2,500 years ago was literally inventing whole fields on the fly. Aristotle’s lack of recourse to mathematical formalism rendered his physics laughable, but his observational acumen lent itself to biology, and his inferences were often quite perspicacious.
But the history of philosophy makes me wonder at contingency and necessity. It strikes me that it is important to observe that Aristotle was a family man. He had a wife and children. Though if you dig into his presonal life it seems to have been conventionally complicated. Plato, in contrast was a lifelong bachelor. Whether he was a homosexual in a physical sense, as a wealthy aristocrat who never married he was somewhat detached from the normal course of affairs in a way the more bourgeois Aristotle never was. Did their life choices affect their philosophy? Or were their philosophies and life choices outcomes of a common cause and personality difference? As the years progress I am less and less convinced by the importance of contingency, in particular reading the ideas of Chinese and Indian thinkers, which in many ways have analogs to the Greeks (even if the emphases might differ). Complex civilization has a Plato-shaped hole, and it has an Aristotle-shaped hole.
This piece in the new TNR, It’s Not Easy Being a Guy in a Country Song, Either, is actually not too bad, as it avoids too much sneering at the subjects. But when implicitly bemoaning the lack of voices in “bro country” which are not white straight, male and culturally* Southern, as well as the topicality of blonde babes, dirt roads, and beer, I’m a little confused as to how the author expects the genre to diversify. If, for example, urban underclass black males were represented in the genre, the topicality would shift. But pretty soon I think it would be hard to differentiate it from hip-hop, because the topics reflect a historical experience. It seems entirely reasonable that the mores and lifestyle of working class Southern white men would be somewhat distasteful to cosmopolitans with a Ph.D.. But if a genre termed “bro country” ever appealed to a feminist whose profession is to be a cultural critic, they’re doing it wrong. If you took Luke Bryan, and just changed his sexual orientation, I doubt that there would be a big audience for songs about his life growing up as a closeted gay man on the dirt roads of Georgia, kicking back with a beer and meeting other guys in the back of his big rig. The cultural landscape is not flat, and some experiences will be more commonly reflected in the arts because they are…more common.
I guess diversity is great, unless it operates outside your narrow ideological purview.
I’ve been busy for the past week. So I’ll answer some of last week’s “open thread” questions here.
First, I’ve been looking for something about ancient+early medieval Arab history. Any suggestions? Here are three: Great Arab Conquests, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World, and A History of the Arab Peoples.
Everyone is talking about and asking me about The New York Times piece, The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogata. Two pairs of identical twins were “switched” at birth in a fashion so that two families raised what they thought were fraternal twins. If the piece fascinated you, you really should read Born that Way. Also, there’s a confusing section in the piece: “On average, the researchers found, any particular trait or disease in an individual is about 50 percent influenced by environment and 50 percent influenced by genes. ” I suspect most readers will take this to mean that the trait in the individual is 50 percent genetic and 50 percent environmental. That is wrong. Rather, 50 percent of the variation in the population is due to variation in genes. There is an obviously implication for individuals, but there is a lot of variation, and for most traits it doesn’t make sense to say that in an individual it is any percent genetic or environmental.
There’s a large section on epigenetics in the article, but they never report results. I assume there’s a publication down the line, and we’ll hear about it. Could epigenetics explain some of the environmental component of variation? Perhaps. But behavior genetics already suggests that non-shared environment is quite large in its effect.
Finally, my wife recommends you watch the documentary (42 minutes) if you have any fluency in Spanish. The article elided a lot of the inter-individual differences which are visible in their manner, speech, and overall physiognomy.
In response to a question about aDNA in China and its utility. The key is sample size. If you are working with Y or mtDNA there is a lot more noise and randomness than intuition would suggest, due to their small effective population sizes.
* Some major figures in the genre, such as Dierks Bentley, were not raised in the South but have assimilated to Southern culture.
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