Iris Murdoch is best known as a writer of novels. She wrote twenty-six of them, recurring often to the question of human freedom versus the many varieties of determinism. One of the novels, The Sea, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 1978. She was also a formidable student of philosophy, and taught the subject at Oxford for many years.

Philosophy at Oxford had departed from the long tradition of reflection about ultimate things. In the 2022 book Metaphysical Animals, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman write that before World War I, the Oxford philosophers took themselves to be engaged in a bold undertaking:

to kill off the subject formerly known as ‘philosophy’ and to replace it with a new set of logical, analytic and scientific methods known as logical positivism. Speculative metaphysical enquiry—the pursuit of knowledge of human nature, morality, God, reality, truth and beauty—was to give way to clarification and linguistic analysis in the service of science. The only questions permitted were those that could be answered by empirical methods.

From the vantage of the present, it is fair to say that they were successful in this, insofar as philosophy was replaced with... whatever we should call that enterprise that takes place in philosophy departments today, in cognitive science, and in all those allied disciplines that name themselves with a “neuro-” prefix. Viewed from the outside, the aspirations of the analytical school look like nothing so much as an elaborate system for evading big questions.

We are aided in identifying them as such by a counter-movement of thought that began after World War II, led by Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot. They inaugurated what would become a dissident strand within academic philosophy. Unlike the existentialists, who likewise rejected the positivist edifice, the Oxford dissidents were more frontally engaged with the analytical turn and sought to identify what had gone wrong in it. That they were women is probably significant. That they were writing after the most shattering events of the twentieth century is also surely significant, as Cumhaill and Wiseman note. When the first of the two great wars ended, the logicians and linguistic analysts picked up right where they had left off, as though nothing significant had occurred that might bear on their undertaking. Iris Murdoch and her circle, by contrast, saw the necessity of returning to the biggest questions. Their moment resembles ours, in that respect, and Murdoch’s essays are a treasure to be recovered.

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Murdoch’s Moral Phenomenology

In one of those essays, “The Idea of Perfection,” what is at stake is the question of how we ought to picture the human being. This is consequential because, as she says in another essay, man is the creature who makes a picture of himself and then comes to resemble that picture. Bad philosophy may fail as a realistic description of the how things are, but such descriptions can be fertile. They are disseminated and taken up, receding as objects of scrutiny but inflecting our patterns of thinking and feeling.

Analytical philosophy of mind has a hard time dealing with the fact that we are moral beings. That is, we have an “evaluative outlook” (I use the phrase of philosopher Talbot Brewer). The things we perceive “show up” for us in a neutral palette sometimes, but often they do so in vivid colors such as lame, charming, inane, subtle, funny, pathetic,winsome, desperate, inspiring, vulgar, overwrought, sly, generous, elegant and so on. These are not neutral descriptive words; they carry a judgment. Also, they are not obtusely binary, such as “good” and “bad,” but more directly tied-on to human situations, more affectively pungent, the kind of words you would need if (like a novelist) you were to undertake something like “moral phenomenology.” Which, come to think of it, is perhaps a good description of Murdoch’s philosophical oeuvre.

Our evaluative outlook—our sense of where value lies, what it looks like, our ability to detect new flavors of it—can change, and typically this change has a direction to it, such that we can call it progress. When a life goes well, our judgments become deeper and more discerning. It would sting to learn that that someone you respect regards you as complacent and self-satisfied, incapable of being arrested by the new in a way that induces an evaluative shift.

The idea of progress in moral perception, indeed the very concept of moral perception, is unintelligible if we dogmatically insist that “value judgments” are merely subjective. That is, if we suppose that when we call something good, this means nothing more than “I prefer this.” Yet such an ethically denuded ontology—there really isn’t anything value-laden out there to perceive—must be insisted upon if philosophy of mind is to claim jurisdiction over the question of how the mind perceives, and insist that it can do so with the logical and conceptual rigor it prides itself on. Such rigor, it is thought, requires abstaining from the fuzzy domain of value judgments. Features of the moral life that are clearly entangled with our “cognitive” capacities (such as perception) must be quarantined, in order to maintain a notion of cognition that is narrow enough to be amenable to analytical methods.

What philosophy of mind needs, then, is an ally in the sphere of ethics that will agree to a clear demarcation between their respective turfs. This demarcation is accomplished if “the good,” understood as the generic of evaluative terms, has no ontological status of its own. Such a tacit agreement established the intellectual cartel that has set the terms of modern life. Mind the gap and you will be in good standing, metaphysically.

Of course, this gap between Is and Ought long predates the rise of today’s narrow academic disciplines. David Hume pointed the way in the eighteenth century. A couple of centuries down that road, the result is a crippling lack of self-awareness in those human sciences that aspire to analytical rigor, driven by a kind of physics-envy. Murdoch writes that philosophy of mind has “been imposing upon us particular value judgments in the guise of a theory of human nature” without knowing that it does so. For its part, “modern ethics tends to constitute a sort of Newspeak which makes certain values non-expressible.”

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The Central Place of Love

Among the facts that have been forgotten or theorized away is the fact that “love is a central concept of morals.” Contemporary philosophers “constantly talk of freedom” but “they rarely talk of love” (299-300). This inarticulacy about love matters. If we don’t have an adequate vocabulary and conceptual repertoire for some phenomenon, we are unable to use language to elaborate our experience. The experience itself becomes harder to fix in the mind, less available to us.

Murdoch’s positive project is arrestingly unconventional. She argues for the central place of love, not just in interpersonal ethics where one might expect to find a discussion of love, but as an epistemic principle. Loving is at the root of our capacity to apprehend the world in its true colors. And this, in turn, is due to an ontological fact concerning the status of “the good.”

Murdoch declares herself a Platonist. The good is real, not a projection of our subjective consciousness onto things we happen to value. The good makes a demand on us, and to respond to this demand adequately is to see things clearly. True perception is thus a moral accomplishment. As we shall see, some of her most compelling arguments demonstrate this in the context of distinguishing great art from ordinary, bad art.

Before spelling these things out, Murdoch needs to clear away a lot of underbrush. (Numbers in parentheses are page numbers in the collection Existentialists and Mystics. I will be referring to three of the essays: “The Idea of Perfection,” “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” and “On the Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.”)

At issue in the Oxford scene was, again, the question of whether “goodness” is a real constituent of the world, something out there. To suppose that it is, was declared to be an instance of “the naturalist fallacy.” The sophisticated position was that “Good is indefinable because judgments of value depend on the will and choice of the individual.” “Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the will.” “Good must be thought of, not as part of the world, but as a movable label affixed to the world; for only so can the agent be pictured as responsible and free” (301).

Tacitly, according to this position, if there were a substantial Good independent of our will, it would threaten the “freedom” that, as Murdoch noted, is the constant preoccupation of modern thought. That is because such a Good would compel us in certain directions rather than others. It would be perverse to choose something bad, after all. It would be irrational. So both our freedom and the sovereignty of our reason were taken to depend on there not being a Good that transcends us and is independent of us. Evidently, thereis a sense of threat to the self that underlies the appeal of moral subjectivism.

This anxiety rests on the modern understanding of what reason is—and of what freedom is. Both notions are narrow, when viewed against the larger sweep of the human tradition. Here, reason always means something public, in the sense that, if something is available to reason, it should be available to all. If it isn’t, it is probably some private, irrational delusion. Meanwhile, freedom is understood as a characteristic of the individual will, revealed in a moment of choice. For this choice to be truly free, it must be entirely my own, a pure eruption of the will that is unconditioned by anything outside the will. True choices are necessarily ungrounded. If you are compelled toward some choice by your reasoning about the situation, it isn’t really an act of your own will. Any person similarly situated, thinking clearly, would choose the same. So the human being is a combined thing: an impersonal rational thinker, whose reasoning cannot escape a publicly observable machinery of logical necessity and shared facts, plus a personal will that leaps around according to no logic at all, until in the moment of choice and action a man inserts himself into the machinery of public reason. It is a picture that combines total freedom and determinism. Murdoch thinks it is mistaken on both sides.

Reason, in this system, must be neutral and objective, carefully abstaining from value judgments. This is what allows us to think of reason and will as separable faculties of the person, corresponding to the distinction between facts and values. “If the will is to be totally free, the world it moves in must be devoid of normative characteristics, so that morality can reside entirely in the pointer of pure choice” (333).

Murdoch names this set of mutually supporting doctrines “behaviorist-existentialist.” Behaviorist because the operation of reason can be detected only by publicly observable actions, and this standard of detection gets imported back into the thing itself: Reason is the sort of thing that issues in actions, as opposed to private revery. To existentialists, on the other side of this intellectual arrangement, freedom means freedom to choose in a pure act of will. There is a hint of mischief in Murdoch’s pointing out that these positions are allied, if we consider them personified. Behaviorists and existentialists wear different costumes (on one side, sensible shoes; on the other, berets) and are sure to detest one another. Yet the determinists and the freedomists need one another, locked as they are in common mistake.

In a subsequent essay titled “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” Murdoch makes a related point. In current moral philosophy, the moral agent is “pictured as an isolated principle of will” beside “a lump of being which has been handed over to other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology. On the one hand a Luciferian philosophy of adventures of the will, and on the other natural science. Moral philosophy, and indeed morals, are thus undefended against an irresponsible and undirected self-assertion which goes easily hand in hand with some brand of pseudo-scientific determinism” (338). Given this easy rapport between pseudo-scientific determinism and Luciferian freedomism, it becomes easier to understand why, for example, the 2023 book Determined, by the Stanford neuro-sage Robert Sapolsky, would reach the bestseller list in a society where “liberation” provides the standard of progress.

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The Formative Role of Attention

As a corrective to the prevailing view, Murdoch emphasizes the role of attention in shaping the world that is actually present to our consciousness. This is happening all the time. By the time a moment of choice arrives, we are already inhabiting a world shaped (for us) by our habits of attention, in the course of which specific currents of its value-laden nature stand forth. Our established habits of seeing will largely set our response. This is a retrospective view of how we became the kind of person who is likely to respond in such-and-such a way.

Looking forward, we are for the most part free to allocate our attention. The question of what to attend to is the question of what to value. The morally relevant “choosing” in some episode happens, then, not in a clap of the will at a dramatic moment of decision but in a piecemeal and cumulative way that is continuous, and has already happened by the time the choice must be made. This does not mean we are not free. But Murdoch’s account does highlight a fact that is weirdly absent from the prevailing view: the existence of moral effort. In large part, such effort consists of the struggle to control one’s attention.

And this is indeed effortful. “Of course psychic energy flows, and more easily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world... Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion” (329). Basically, you have to get out of your own head to see things clearly. She calls such effort “unselfing”.

In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” Murdoch says she is not a Freudian, but she shares Freud’s view that our psychic energies are not simply available to us to direct in a deliberate way; there is a roiling layer of the unconscious and the semi-conscious urging us along at every turn. And the consistent tendency of these psychic energies is selfish. It is a tendency shaped and hardened into particular channels by our own biography. Murdoch writes, “Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by...” (331). Unselfing may be accomplished through self-criticism, but such a negative effort of ego-asceticism has its limits.

But to love is to be drawn out of our self-centered patterns toward some positive object that is other than oneself. Love thus has the same outward-pulling tendency as attention. And reciprocally, to attend to something fully is, in a sense, to love it.

Murdoch’s suggestion here is a bit obscure. May not my accomplishment of clear vision, through a patient and just attention, reveal something that is rightly to be hated? How then are we to suppose there is a natural kinship between love and attention? I believe her position becomes tenable if we provide a premise that is a bit elusive, appearing only fleetingly, in her own account: The good, which is lovable, is somehow fundamental, ontologically. If that is the case, attention that penetrates to this fundamental layer will reveal something lovable, even in the hateful. I will return to this question at the end.

Relieving the Burden of Choice Through Obedience to Reality

Murdoch provides philosophical ground for making sense of “the paradox of choice” (a term coined by Barry Schwartz and taken up in recent psychology). Psychologists find that a proliferation of choices makes people less satisfied with whatever choice they end up making. This is not surprising, if the crazy proliferation of choices under consumer capitalism is the public correlate of the bad philosophy Murdoch has identified: our identification of freedom with the ungrounded leaping about of the will. A false picture of the human situation can make people unhappy, in ways detectable by empirical psychology.

Murdoch writes, “If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.” This is the reverse of the behaviorist-existentialist prescription, which is that we should seek to increase our freedom by “conceptualizing as many different possibilities of action as possible.”

The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’. (331)

Will and reason then are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent....As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection. (332)

Great Art Is a Moral-Cognitive Accomplishment

“One of the great merits of the moral psychology which I am proposing is that it does not contrast art and morals, but shows them to be two aspects of a single struggle.” The existentialist-behaviorist view is tacit in what she calls “the familiar Kantian-Bloomsbury slogan” of “art for arts sake.” Murdoch finds such a view of art “intolerable.”

Goodness and beauty are not to be contrasted, but are largely part of the same structure. Plato, who tells us that beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love immediately by nature, treats the beautiful as the introductory section of the good. So that aesthetic situations are not so much analogies of morals as cases of morals. (332)

For the most part, contemporary theorists of art have banished the term “beauty” even from the domain of art. Perhaps that is because beauty points toward goodness in just the way Plato suggested, and intimations of such a connection must be suppressed if one is to remain metaphysically respectable. But what if respectability is here purchased at the cost of metaphysical cowardice?

The existentialist picture of choice is connected to a crypto-democratic view of art that can’t distinguish great art from the ordinary productions of ordinary artists, which exhibit the same distortions as our everyday consciousness.

Art presents the most comprehensible examples of the almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy and also of the effort to resist this and the vision of reality which comes with success. Success in fact is rare. Almost all art is a form of fantasy-consolation and few artists achieve the vision of the real. The talent of the artist can be readily, and is naturally, employed to produce a picture whose purpose is the consolation and aggrandisement of its author and the projection of his personal obsessions and wishes. To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic.’ The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only (for all its difficulties) the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real. Of course great artists are ‘personalities’ and have special styles; even Shakespeare occasionally, though very occasionally, reveals a personal obsession. But the greatest art is ‘impersonal’ because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all. (352)

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It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. (353)

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If, still led by the clue of art, we ask further questions about the faculty which is supposed to relate us to what is real and thus bring us to what is good, the idea of compassion or love will be naturally suggested. It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love. (354)

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Good art “affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent.” (370)

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“An understanding of any art involves a recognition of hierarchy and authority.... We surrender ourselves to [good art’s] authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish. (372)

I have reproduced these passages at length to show just how fertile is Murdoch’s use of art as a window onto the everyday challenges and aspirations that come with being the sort of creature who is attracted to what is excellent. This attraction is at the heart of our capacity for clarity (such as it is). In Platonic terms, the Good is that in light of which reality reveals itself, like the sun that illuminates the Earth.

Murdoch endorses this Platonic point while rejecting the existence of the Idea of the Good, if we mean that as “people used to think that God existed” (361). This statement occurs near the outset of the essay “On the Sovereignty of ‘Good’ Over Other Concepts.” Without fanfare, she takes it as a beginning point for her inquiry that human life has “no external point or telos” (364) and “there is no God” (365).

The Good/God Question

Here Murdoch becomes elusive and frustrating. I say that not as a believer who wishes to have a formidable secular thinker on side, but on grounds internal to her own thinking. Her entire argument through these three essays is teleological and makes frequent recourse to the idea of the transcendent as the necessary anchor for our aspiration to clarity. That aspiration is inseparable from our aspiration to excellence. The good, she says, is the “magnetic center of attraction” that provides direction and authority to our efforts. As a simple statement of psychological fact, this is recognizable and straightforward. Going deeper into any field of human endeavor reveals standards and degrees of excellence that were previously invisible to one as a novice. One’s standards get higher: there is little that is very good, and perhaps nothing that is perfect. Yet “the idea of perfection” produces “an increasing sense of direction” to any endeavor. “The idea of perfection moves, and possibly changes, us (as artist, worker, agent) because it inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy” (emphasis added). “The idea of perfection is also a natural producer of order. In its light we see that A, which superficially resembles B, is really better than B” (emphasis in original). And this occurs without us needing to have “the perfect” or “the good” pinned down. Indeed it can’t be pinned down. But this is not because the good is a mere projection of our preferences. It can’t be pinned down because the good “always lies beyond, and it is from this beyond that it exercises its authority” (emphasis in original). All of this from page 350.

Yet human life “has no external point or telos,” she says, bafflingly (364). It sometimes seems as though Murdoch is trying to re-invent the wheel while scrupulously abstaining from the use of a circle, and the result is flat contradiction. It will be said that her position has no contradiction it we take the good, and the idea of perfection, only as heuristics that carry some psychological utility. It is on such grounds that she entertains the efficaciousness of prayer and even sacraments. She is compelled to think about these practices by the rest of her argument. Let me briefly rehearse the steps by which she gets to a consideration of prayer.

Murdoch’s picture of the self is that of “an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the state of the system in between moments of choice” (344). Hence the importance of training our attention, by way of forming “the system” and giving it a set, if you will. Given the naturally selfish tendencies of the system, and the limited efficacy of self-criticism and negative efforts of the will, it needs objects of love to pull it out of itself, the better to glimpse reality. The believer, she says, has an advantage in this. “The religious believer, especially if his God is conceived as a person, is in the fortunate position of being able to focus his thought upon something which is a source of energy” (345).

Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. With it goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavor which overcomes empirical limitations of personality. What is this attention like, and can those who are not religious believers conceive of profiting by such an activity? (344)

Likewise, Murdoch sees the value of sacraments. “A sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit” (356).

She quotes Wittgenstein with approval: “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.” This would seem to state an intuition that is perilously close to the idea that existence itself is a miracle.

Yet Murdoch labors valiantly to keep the God hypothesis at bay. The effort is worthwhile. Taking no shortcuts and availing herself not at all of the theological tradition, by her model she challenges the complacency of believers for whom received dogma may short-circuit the work of reflection by which religious experience (like experience altogether) is deepened. But at some point, her persistence in rejecting God, while invoking religious practices and relying on religious concepts, itself begins to look dogmatic. Or like a case of someone taking the principle of parsimony to the point of vacating her own logic. As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. And no simpler.”

Or perhaps hers is a case of intellectual scruples overdeveloped to the point of spiritual blockage, a prudish fear of flying. One wants to say to her, “My dear Iris. Live a little. Take a gamble.” One of the stock opinions of atheists is that belief in God is a consolation for the weak, who lack the courage to face a universe that does not care for human beings. But an inflection can occur in one’s perception (and it certainly feels like a case of seeing further, more clearly, in my own case) after which this looks not courageous but anxious and self-protective, in the way of a man whose dignity rests on making sure he is not duped. Or who wishes not to be in anyone’s debt and therefore refuses a gift for fear it will compromise him. This is ill-mannered.

As it happens, the occasion for my re-reading of these essays (I previously encountered them twenty years ago, as an atheist) was that my wife Marilyn and I hosted a Lent reading group devoted to them, for members of our parish. Toward the end of our sessions, Marilyn wondered if Murdoch’s theological inhibition may stem from a fear of being loved, because it entails being fully known.

Murdoch recognizes the psychological utility of an imagined “God” as an object of love. But what if this God really is other to the self, and loves us back? On Murdoch’s own account, it is in and through love that one perceives most fully. To be on the receiving end of this, to be fully known—even the number of hairs on one’s head—by a God that is the real source of Good is to take an existential risk that few modern thinkers can abide.

Yet such a hypothesis would make compelling a key intuition of Murdoch’s which, in her own treatment of it, remains mysterious. Namely, that a full and just attention – to anything at all – will reveal something to be loved. Even (as for St. Francis) the pus-filled wounds of the leper. This begins to make sense if the world and everything in it was made by an intelligence who acted out of love.

Suppose all is atoms, as the materialist says. That there should be such a thing as an atom is surely miracle enough: a nucleus, around which dance electrons that are particles and yet also waves, an ensemble of actuality that remains open to possibility. If substance itself is properly an object of wonder, gratitude and love, Murdoch‘s argument is completed.

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My fellow Archedeliacs,

I will be speaking on “Hospitality and the Political” on April 9 at the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, which is at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Here is a taste of what is on offer:

We live under an authoritative opinion or attitude, often called “humanitarianism.” It is authoritative in the sense that it provides the basic scaffold of meaning for prestige opinion in the West, in its encounter with non-Western peoples. This attitude, one of unqualified welcome to “the other,” appears to grow out of the Christian inheritance, yet is distinct from it.

In this lecture, Matthew Crawford will critique humanitarianism as resting on a thinned-out and abstract anthropology of “mankind.” Adherents to this humanitarian anthropology yearn for a post-political condition, one of unfractured unity among all peoples. It is a position that takes itself to be uniquely empathetic. Yet this crusade for unity induces a peculiar disability of moral perception.

Crawford will make a contrary case for understanding man as “the political animal,” who becomes what he properly is only through formation among a particular people. He will also sketch the need for a Christian humanism that would do justice to this fact.

Here is a link to the event page.

https://houstoncentre.org/events

• Thursday, April 9, 2026

• 5:30 PM — 8:30 PM

• University Golf Club at the University of British Columbia

Everyone is welcome to attend. If you do, please come and introduce yourself!

— Matt

In his 1943 work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper offered one of the early articulations of “the open society” as an ideal. It is an ideal that gathers up some of the West’s dearest principles: universalism, toleration, cosmopolitanism, individualism. As against the chauvinism that is native to political life, the ideal of the open society …

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The unknown traveler shows up storm-tossed, naked and hungry. He is bathed and clothed, the best wine skins are brought, a meal is laid. Beautifully depicted in Homer, hospitality is a kind of grace—a good bestowed on another outside the realm of exchange and without regard to his merit.

In due time, when every comfort has been provided, he is asked, “Wh…

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As near as one can tell, the business rationale for AI rests on the hope that it will substitute for human judgment and discretion. Given the role of big data in trai…

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One of my favorite YouTube videos features a guy who is clearly a skilled stunt motorcycle rider practicing controlled, nearly walking-speed wheelies in the empty parking lot of a shopping mall. He has a video camera attached to his helmet. He is approached by a man with a clipboard, that universal talisman of functionaries who take themselves to be deputized on behalf of order. What the functionary says is hard to make out in the recording (probably something about safety). But then it hardly matters, does it? It is really the clipboard that conveys the message, a mute form of authority that often has no real argument to give, and can be effective only if everyone automatically defers to it.

But our stunt rider doesn’t do this. From his helmet cam, we see him riding in a slow circle around Clipboard Man on one wheel, and you can sense that he is at ease. “Does this look dangerous?” he asks, a bit incredulously.

He has a point, which is easy to grasp if you have ever been nearly killed in a parking lot by some upstanding member of the PTA backing out in her Suburban.

But then wheelie guy takes it to the next level. He says to Clipboard Man, “You’re just confused, and it makes you feel things.” The functionary really does seem to be stumped by this interaction.

Wheelie guy rides off. He clearly won the battle, in some important sense, but isn’t fool enough to think the police will be hip to his higher logic.

According to that logic, it is not just that Clipboard Man’s mission is gratuitous, objectively speaking (the parking lot is empty). He is “confused” and it makes him “feel things.” The fetish of rule-following becomes its own justification, and it fills him with a lust for enforcement even when there probably isn’t, in fact, any rule to cover parking lot wheelies. At the risk of seeming unpatriotic, I have the sad duty of pointing out that this seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. As my French friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy said to me, “You are rule worshippers,” to the point we will make up rules on the fly to cover unanticipated eruptions of the human spirit. To compensate, we keep singing a song to ourselves about being “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

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Parking lot wheelies do not compute

The idea of the “smart city” is that the logic of interconnected electronic devices can be applied to the human landscape. Everything that takes place in the smart city will be optimized and orchestrated by an “urban operating system.” The energy and sewage infrastructure, police protections, trash collection, the allocation of parking and street capacity, the orchestration of traffic lights, the timing of deliveries and all the other services that make a city work will be massaged by data science and achieve a kind of frictionlessness.

Of course, human beings tend to do things that are unpredictable, making them the bug in the system. But if people can be coaxed into driverless cars, it may become possible that our movements through the city can be monitored and coordinated from afar, bringing us closer to what the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “a glorious, collisionless manner of living.” He was naming the ambition of a certain modern character-type, whom he called “the rationalist.”

Transformative urban planning has long been an ambition of the high-modernist mindset. The goals of such planning are usually public health, efficiency, beauty and something more elusive, order. Some cities that have gotten the full treatment over the last two centuries are wonderful places to visit despite their controversial remakings; see Paris (much of it demolished and rebuilt by Baron Haussmann under Louis Napoleon in the 19^th century). Others, like Brasilia and Chandigarh (both designed from the ground up by Le Corbusier), quickly became ghost towns, full of high-modernist buildings and plazas of impressive conceptual ambition through which the wind whistled forlornly, eventually to be repurposed by squatters or stripped of building materials for use in the surrounding shanty towns where urban life carries on in defiance of the master plan. Such projects are sometimes sited in countries in the developing world that are attractive to Western visionaries precisely because they have no robust tradition of self-rule, and therefore offer no organized resistance to the plan. Le Corbusier offered his services as a planner to Western authoritarians—both the Vichy regime and Stalin’s USSR—before hitting upon this strategy of siting his projects in the developing world.

The history of trying to render the city as an object of rational planning is a checkered one, with successes and failures both. The longing for order that underlies it is sometimes impervious to chastisement by the stubborn realities of human behavior. Something in the technocratic personality is easily tempted into a moral-intellectual space that floats free of the empirical, and has more in common with the non-falsifiable commitments of a cult.

Grand visions are easy to criticize on these grounds, and I will mount such a criticism of the smart city shortly. But let’s begin by noting that usually it is more small-bore, uncoordinated attempts to assert control by that, cumulatively, can lead to a clampdown on the human spirit in urban spaces. Yet, precisely because of the petty-tyrant character of such clampdowns—the obvious fact that they are clampdowns—they may summon a response in certain bold souls that is beautiful to behold. Like Wheelie Guy.

The rapper Lupe Fiasco has a beautiful track titled “Kick, Push” that tells the story of an urban kid who comes to maturity through skateboarding, and in doing so comes up against clipboard authority.

Since the first kick flip he landed

Labeled a misfit a bandit

His neighbors couldn’t stand it

So he was banished to the park

Started in the morning

Wouldn’t stop till after dark

Yea when they said its getting late in here

So I’m sorry young man there’s no skating here

He goes on to meet a girl skater; she takes him to spot in a parking lot he didn’t know about, with an odd feature to it, and they grind it until “security came and said there’s no skating here.” They become part of a crew. They get chased out of office building plazas. “Just the freedom was better than breathing.”

Coming of age, fugitive love, solidarity: getting chased off by “security” plays a role in creating the dissident bond. What a shame it would be if there were no Clipboard Men to heighten the experience of freedom! Like Wheelie Guy, the protagonists of “Kick, Push” confront the forces of order personified: functionaries who are nonetheless flesh and blood, giving chase to kids on skateboards and probably relishing the chase for human reasons of their own. What becomes of this human drama—the drama of freedom—when order is rendered algorithmically? Where is the fight? It is submerged and illegible. It already happened, somewhere else, and the skaters were not party to it.

Sometimes urban spaces are designed to forestall moments like those depicted by Lupe Fiasco, making the explicit intervention of “security” unnecessary because the possibilities of use have been more rigorously constrained by the design itself.

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A soapbox derby is a race, usually held by children, in which the cars are powered solely by gravity. Portland’s Adult Soapbox Derby has been running annually since 1997 on Mt. Tabor, a steeply hilled park within the city limits. The event’s website conveys the flav…

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A lot of young men seem to be stuck on their couches in a stupor of screens, unable to launch a life. One could point to any number of contributing factors, material and psychological. Surely one of them is that the basic engine of male aspiration – competition -- has fallen under suspicion in our egalitarian moral landscape.

What your better self might …

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Buying a motorcycle with over 100 horsepower is kind of like buying a pound of coke. You’re basically saying to yourself, I’m just going to go ahead and be an asshole for the foreseeable future, and see what that’s like. What it is like is that the rest of the world is moving in slow motion, and it is excruciating. The lanes painted on the road appear acres wide. The enclosed, lumbering objects you share the road with are essentially standing still, and it makes no sense to abide by their rules.

Imagine you are Stephen Hawking and you wake up one day to discover that you have switched bodies with Stephen Curry. The life you have lived up to that point is no longer livable. However great the intellectual pleasures of Newton’s Laws once were, suddenly the expanding universe is something you feel in your body. It calls you forward from your present limitations: faster. Space-time dilates, and you are working in a different frame.

In 2016, after fifteen years of riding a bike with 35 horsepower every day, I bought a modern Yamaha with about 120. It was roughly like going from an Irish donkey cart to something nuclear powered, with the precision of a Swiss watch. The acceleration was nearly hallucinogenic, the cornering scalpel-like.

A few months later I rode it down to Virginia International Raceway to watch races in various motorsport disciplines that were crammed into single weekend. I was creeping along North Paddock Road, shortly past the entrance to VIR, when I spotted a plume of smoke billowing into the heavy summer sky. Not a little smoke — it was a dense, rolling cumulus. That looks bad, I thought. I pictured a driver trapped upside down in a roll cage, frantically trying to activate a fire suppression system. But then it occurred to me that this smoke wasn’t black, as you would expect from a gasoline and plastics inferno; it was white. As I got closer to the action I could see that this was tire smoke, and that it is not the sign of a mishap but rather the main point of drifting.

Drifting is a motor sport in which one goes around corners sideways, tires spinning furiously. How sideways? The most acclaimed drivers sometimes take it to point of entering a corner nearly backward, which has the visually elegant effect of pre-rotating the car, pointing it in the direction it will be headed as it exits a 180-degree turn. Picture a really excellent movie car chase and you’ll begin to get the idea. To watch two or three cars drifting in tandem, a few feet apart as they slide through a series of turns, is to learn that human beings have come up with a new form of dance. It might be the most beautiful thing that happens on four wheels.

But for the moment, I had some more pressing concerns of a personal nature. I was going to ride in one of these 1,000-horsepower beasts, and I didn’t want to soil myself. Some of the drivers appeared to be at the ragged edge; I really thought a red Nissan was going to lose it a number of times and go careening into the concrete barrier, but somehow the driver brought it back each time. The speed, the ground-shaking exhaust noise, the thick contrails of tire smoke, and above all the intensity of purpose that was evident in the driving made me wonder if I might have gotten in over my head.

Surely my driver would take it down a notch or two, having a civilian in the car? As I stood there sweating in jeans and boots and a bad case of helmet hair after the three-hour ride from Richmond, I signed a waiver that was too long to read—though my eyes did pick out the phrase “extremely dangerous.”

My driver, Forrest Wang, looked about twenty-five years old. He wasn’t wearing a fire suit, a Hans device (the standard neck restraint), or any such markers of prudence. He was wearing a T-shirt that mimicked the eponymous RUN-DMC album cover, but instead read “RUN 2JZ.” (2JZ is a Toyota engine code.) This wasn’t Formula One. There were no Fly Emirates or Rolex banners draped across the track, and no Medevac helicopter idling nearby. I asked: Forrest built his own roll cage. “That’s awesome!” I said, with less than perfect sincerity.

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The most shining moment of my education as a physics major at U.C. Santa Barbara came in the final lecture of an upper-division course on electricity and magnetism. We had learned the facts early in the semester, and could do the problem sets. Then the instructor, Nobel laureate Bob Schrieffer, seemed to take us backwards. He spent a few lectures plumbi…

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The Times reports today that the machinery of youth sports in America is being bought up by private equity firms.

At the top end, there are sports academies that are also boarding schools, such as IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, which charges $85k per year. Of course, most families are spending nothing like that amount. But the youth sports apparatus as a whole takes in about $40 billion per year in the U.S., which is over four times the domestic box office of all of Hollywood, according to the Times article.

“He’s my only child, and like most parents, you want to do anything you can for your kid,” said Mr. Bash, who runs a diner…

It’s no wonder that sports dads like Mr. Bash have caught the attention of Wall Street investors.

Families involved in competitive youth sports spend a life-eating amount of time driving to practices and games. Where there is this kind of devotion, there is likely to be some element of life that is “underpriced”, that is, not yet fully gathered into the money matrix. If people’s time, attention and hopes for their kids’ futures are being funneled together at some site of shared activity, private equity sees this as an opportunity to position itself at that site and establish new extractive mechanisms. This is “rentier capitalism.”

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I previously posted this as a Note, but I suspect most people don’t read Notes.

The other day I took my project car out for a test run and got about two blocks before it died. As it sputtered to a stop, there was a group of maybe 8 high school boys standing nearby. They were looking at me and seemed on the verge of cracking up with laughter. I yelled ove…

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First, a hat-tip to Sohrab Ahmari for the term “burrito antifada.”

In what follows, my premise is that the ICE raids are only the proximate trigger of the current unrest. In this post, I will merely reproduce a few points made by others that emphasize material interests and larger political forces that are in play. By way of throa…

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In the phone conversation I had this morning while trying to schedule an x-ray, I feel like the new reality stood fully naked before me. With each of the several bureaucracies involved, there was a comprehensive breakdown of that most rudimentary human activity: exchanging information.

To begin with, most immediately, there was an auditory problem. I ca…

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Over the last several years, I realized I was driving around town a lot to take care of little tasks that, in principle, could be done on the telephone, or on the web portal of some business or government entity. The frustrations of entering into that Kafkaesque world of chatbots that are “here to help,” or phone menus that seem imported from some gener…

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Early in the G.W. Bush administration, the White House established a President’s Council on Bioethics. It was led by one of my teachers, Leon Kass. Few of its recommendations found their way into policy, but the reports issued by the Council are superb examples of humanistic inquiry in the service of big public concerns. Under Kass’s leadership, the Council tasked itself with understanding what was at stake at a moment when emerging technologies such as cloning and gene editing promised new therapeutic possibilities, but promised also to give us new end-runs around the limits and natural forms of human embodiment. The removal of such limits was sure to come with big social implications.

A week ago, I participated in the first meeting of an Artificial Intelligence Ethics Council convened by the American Enterprise Institute. Though it doesn’t have the imprimatur of the White House, the Council has positioned itself as heir to the Kass effort: like the biotech moment of 25 years ago, our AI moment similarly cries out for deep and far-reaching reflection on what is at stake. At both junctures, the question is pressed upon us, what is a human being?

For biotech, the human animal is regarded as something highly plastic that can be modified and optimized according to some plan of our own. For AI, the founding aspiration (dating from the late 1940s) is to create a mechanized version of the mind. These two projects are in fact deeply entangled in the conceit that the genome operates like a computer program. Like such a program, the human code could be run on an indefinite variety of different hardware platforms, and there is nothing inherently special about carbon versus silicon. Biotech and AI are thus both what you might call anthropological technologies, in the sense that they express and advance a similar picture of the human.

As Jean-Pierre Dupuy put it in his incomparable book The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, “For man to be able, as subject, to exercise power of this sort over himself, it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of an object, able to be reshaped to suit any purpose. No raising up can occur without a concomitant lowering, and vice versa.”

When I was writing about philosophy of mind and the question of a materialism twenty years ago, I liked to offer a simple thought experiment by way of orienting the discussion. If a dog bumps into an abacus and accidentally moves some of the beads, has the dog “done arithmetic?” Has the abacus? I think the answer to both questions has to be “no”. A human observer may choose to interpret the abacus’ change from one machine state to another as an instance of arithmetic having been done. It is important to know that a digital computer is not different from an abacus in any fundamental way. To think otherwise amounts to a crude animism.

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Sometime around 1830, a young Frenchman of aristocratic family, with liberal sympathies, got on a boat headed to America. He wanted to see the new democracy in action. He travelled around and reported what he saw: a vigorous spirit of self-government that manifested in a hundred little ways. But he also got intimations of trouble down the road.

I refer,…

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Do you still remember the first snowfall on a late autumn or winter day, when you were a child? It was like the intrusion of a new reality. Something shy and strange that had come to visit us, falling down upon and transforming the world around us, without our having to do anything. An unexpected gift. Falling snow is perhaps the purest manifestation of uncontrollability.

-- Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018)

Hartmut Rosa is a German social theorist who first became prominent with his thesis that modern life is marked by unceasing “acceleration” on every front, making it hard to experience repose in any settled lifeworld. The result is a kind of deep, existential homelessness. He followed this with a big book titled Resonance (2016), in which he reflected on an elusive type of experience. The magic of a first snowfall, as in the passage above, would be one example of “resonance”.

Some experiences cannot be summoned at will. Other examples include falling sleep, or falling in love. Or the outcome of a soccer match. Rosa writes that “the driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.” (The Uncontrollability of the World, p. 2)

Because we, as late-modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable “at every level -- individual, cultural, institutional, and structural— we invariably encounter the world as… a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life’, the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world – that which makes resonance possible—seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety….” (p. 4)

The compulsion to render the world controllable has a number of elements: making things visible, making things reachable or accessible, making them manageable, and making them useful. All of these imperatives are thoroughly “entrenched in the institutions that form the basis of modern society,” from science and technology to economics to legal regulations and administrative apparatuses. We take them up in our private lives as well, subjecting the serendipities of love to the optimizing logic of dating apps, for example. But all of this is attended by a characteristically modern anxiety -- that of the “world’s falling mute, becoming grey and colorless.” If the world is falling mute, it is because we are loosing our ability to hear its “call” or “appeal”. The ability to be touched and moved by the not-self. When we do find ourselves moved – by a landscape, a melody or an idea, for example -- the experience sheds light on our usual condition.

Something suddenly calls to us, moves us from without, and becomes important to us for its own sake. The person or thing from whom or from which we experience such a call appears to us to be not just of instrumental value, but intrinsically important. We know we have been affected in this way when, say, our sorrowful countenance abruptly becomes radiant, or when we suddenly find that we have tears in our eyes. Such signs indicate that the shell of reification behind which we usually operate in a world oriented toward escalation, optimization, calculation, and domination has, for a moment, been punctured and we have left the mode of aggression.

At such moments, we escape our usual background state of alienation through “a kind of double movement between subject and world.” We develop an intrinsic interest in some part of the world and, reciprocally, we feel ourselves somehow “addressed” by it. Uncontrollability by itself – mere contingency -- is not enough to create resonance. It occurs when something uncontrollable speaks to us, and we respond.

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Pual Sherz did a Ph. D in bio-chemistry at Harvard, then another doctorate in theology at Notre Dame. He is one of the rare thinkers able to speak in a scientific register who is also informed by the rich human tradition of puzzling through the deepest matters of existence. His 2022 book Tomorrow’s Troubles is a meditation on anxiety, risk, and our attitude to the future. He writes about an epochal move that the Western mind made, one fruit of which is our compulsion to control the world.

At some point, we began to use spatial metaphors when we think about time. In risk analysis, the future is envisioned as a decision space, with branching nodes at each point of action and consequence. Time is thus spatialized and multiplied: there are multiple possible futures, and our task is to trace an optimal path through these possibilities. This is not just an activity of decision-theorists gaming out war scenarios, or actuaries tabulating risks. It reflects an understanding of time that shows up in many areas of philosophy and popular culture, and is codified in institutions. The problem is that it doesn’t correspond to the way we actually experience time. But it does feed back into our experience of time and infect it, as it were. It does so in such a way as to exaggerate the role of our own will, and make it seem imperative to control the future. Resonance recedes, anxiety increases.

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In our reading of On The Genealogy of Morals we considered Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity from the perspective of pagan nobility. Today we consider another critique of Christianity, also from the Right, but based on quite a different set of psychological or anthropological considerations. We can designate this the romantic-conservative critique, in the tradition of counter-Enlightenment. I have chosen two authors, Stephen Jenkinson and Michael Oakeshott. Jenkinson offers an armchair history, lightly documented by highly suggestive, of the effects of Christianity on the lifeworld of pagan Europe. Oakeshott marks out two ideal types of moral order, the customary and the idealistic, and finds Christianity partaking too much of the latter. Both authors issue challenges to Christians that are worth chewing on. I don’t think they touch the core of the faith, but I find it useful to work through them. The texts are Stephen Jenkinson, Come of Age (2018), Chapter 12 and Michael Oakeshott, “The Tower of Babel,” which first appeared in 1948 and is included in the collection Rationalism in Politics.

Jenkinson’s book is a “case for elderhood.” We have a glut of old people, but a dearth of elders: people who by their wisdom and example, and by the place we accord them, can anchor the present in the great chain of begetting that gives life depth. He traces the movements by which the West discarded its elders. Chapter 12 begins with the Roman empire. It was a “mongrel monolith” that expanded through conquest and the assimilation of the conquered: they were removed from their homeland, detached from their native gods and the graves of their ancestors, and conscripted as soldiers to push the boundary of empire out yet further. They would settle in some foreign place and intermarry with the locals.

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