Summer Reading List 2023

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today’s episode has been generously sponsored by the Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. It’s our annual Summer Reading List—thought-provoking books for thoughtful readers.

Ray Briggs
This year, we’ve picked out a few new titles that caught our interest, including one that takes a new look at Effective Altruism, a topic we discussed in an episode last fall.

Josh Landy
Later in the show we’ll be joined by Lori Gruen from Wesleyan University. She’s one of the editors of “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism.”

Ray Briggs
We’ll also be joined by our Stanford colleague, Gabriella Safran. She’s a professor of Slavic languages and literatures and has a new book called Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century,” which is all about middle class writers trying to represent the voice of the people.

Josh Landy
And we’ll take summer reading suggestions from listeners like you.

Ray Briggs
But first, let’s kick off this year’s summer reading list with a little bit of… television.

The Good Place
You’re okay, Eleanor—you’re in the good place.

Ray Briggs
“The Good Place,” which aired for four seasons on NBC, followed a group of misfits as they navigated moral questions in the afterlife. It was created by Michael Schur, who consulted a bunch of philosophers, like our friend Pamela Hieronymi from UCLA.

Josh Landy
Yeah, one of my favorite moments in this show was when Chidi, the philosophy professor, gets impatient with his students.

The Good Place
I just don’t feel like you’re engaging with the material—like with the trolley problem. That was just tricky. That’s all Why don’t you just tell me the right answer? Well, that’s what’s so great about the trolley problem is that there is no right answer. This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors. I’m on your side here, dude, but he is not wrong.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, not only does everyone hate moral philosophy professors, they kind of hate moral philosophy too. And can you blame them? Seems like a quest to be a perfect person would make you miserable.

The Good Place
Oh, that has an interesting aftertaste. Is that from a nearby river? Oh, no. Why take freshwater away from the beavers and the fish? No, I have my composting toilet hooked up to a water filtration system. One man’s waste is another man’s water. And both men are me!

Ray Briggs
“The Good Place” wrapped in 2020. But its creator had enough of the philosophy bug to write a book called “How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” and to join us on today’s program to talk about it. Michael Schur, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Michael Shur
Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Josh Landy
So Michael, in this book, you tell us you love philosophy,you love Beckett, you love Woody Allen but you kind of feel bad about it, you love single malt whiskey,you hate the Yankees, you think Heidegger is a fascist,you have a bad sense of direction, you think running is awful, no one should ever do it unless being chased by a bear. My question to you is: are you my long-lost twin?

Michael Shur
Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that I have a soulmate. And that list you just made, like, that’s a good person. If you want to know what a good person is, it’s somebody would have it’s that list of characteristics.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, wait, I lose points for liking running?

Michael Shur
Correct. That is absolutely correct. Yes, you’re a bad person.

Ray Briggs
So this kind of brings me into another question. So I kind of identify with Chidi in The Good Place, where I would really like to be a good person but I kind of get paralyzed. There are so many choices I have to make every day. There seem like so many possible ways for me to choose wrong. What am I supposed to do?

Michael Shur
Great question. I think that most philosophers that I have met fall into the general category of God, like what are the things that you’re doing when you write a television show, it’s you’re trying to create characters that folks can identify with, right? That’s a pretty basic idea. And I’ve never had any group of people more directly relate to and identify with a character than professional academic philosophers in particular, and Chidi Annigoni, so you’re not alone. And I would also say, by the way that I identify with him, too, it’s part of why this subject matter became so interesting to me. And so important to me is that as the I found that the more I cared about the world that I lived in, and the more I cared about other people, the more impossible my life started to seem. Because when you decide that all of the things you do mean something and matter, then you start questioning all of the choices you’re making and there is a ignorance is bliss thing that you leave behind, right and as soon as you learn about, you know, global warming or climate change, you start thinking like it gets all the way down to the to the microcosmic level of Well, should I buy this pair of socks or not? thought, and it can be maddening. And so, you know, I think the show, and to a large extent the book was making the argument that the important thing is that you care one way or the other, whether you’re a good person and that you try wherever you can to be a good person, that to me is actually more important than the sort of impossible to answer question of, Am I actually achieving that? Am I a good person? Because the attempt at virtue to me is, is the thing that is that matters the most.

Ray Briggs
So I was going to ask whether it was a mistake for me to have taken my first philosophy class, because it would be so much easier if I hadn’t done that. So why is this agonizing good and important?

Michael Shur
I mean, this is sort of a reductive argument, I suppose. But like, what’s the option, not caring at all? You know, I just I got to a point in my life where I thought, in the moments where I was like, God, it’s so irritating, to have to care about this stuff to have to care about every consumer choice you make, and every friendship choice you make. And every parenting choice you make, with this extra added level of like, is this virtuous? Is this, you know, deontological ly Correct? Whatever your methodology is, as annoying as that is, it just occurred to me at some point like, well, the option is that you don’t care. And I just can’t believe that the right answer, in terms of how to live our lives on earth is to not care one way or the other, whether the things you’re doing are good. So, look, it’s annoying, I get it. I mean, that’s what a lot of the book is about is how annoying it is to care about this stuff, and how much of a pain in the butt you are to your friends and family members and everyone around you. But I think it’s a far better outcome for an average life on Earth to care and be a little bit annoying about it than to not care at all. I just can’t see how that’s the right answer.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and one thing I love about this book, How To Be perfect that you take all these theories, deontology consequentialism, virtue ethics, contractual ism. Buddhism, you also talked about a boon to, and you kind of boiled them down very helpfully to a set of heuristics. So you know, ask yourself, would it be okay, if everyone did this, ask yourself, how many people will be happier or sadder, as a result of me doing this? Rather than that? Am I being a good kind of person? I mean, those seem like very, you know, on the one hand, you could say, yes, they’re fairly simple guidelines. On the other hand, they they’re kind of powerful.

Michael Shur
I think so too. And I think that the expressed goal of the book was to say, look, I don’t understand this stuff nearly as well as folks who have studied it their whole lives or who specializes in it. But I think I understand them well enough to be able to relate their central ideas. And that became the project of the book really, was to say, like, Hey, I think there’s a lot of people out there who would hear words like deontological reasoning, or consequentialism, or whatever. And think like, well, I don’t understand that there’s no chance that I could ever relate to those ideas or those issues. And the point of the book was to say like, no, the the words are, they have a lot of letters in them. And they have a lot of syllables. But the ideas contained in these theories are pretty straightforward. Like, I’ll tell you, I did when during COVID, my son was in sixth grade, and we were desperate for things for him and his classmates to do that weren’t, you know, look at tick tock. And my wife suggested a lot of the kids are watching the show, or watching the good place. And my wife said, you know, why don’t you do like a little fun, like seminar about the show and about philosophy. Because you’ve been, you know, reading about it and studying it and working on it for so long. And I was a little skeptical. But we got about 30 kids together on a zoom once a week, and I would give them a couple episodes of the show to watch that were centered around one or the other of the philosophers I talked about in the book, and then we would get on the Zoom, we would talk about the episodes, I would relate to them, the philosophy that we were discussing, and the kids were totally engaged and involved and asked really smart questions. And I was like, man, you know, if sixth grade students, bright students, but sixth grade students can, you know, interact with these ideas and press me on on the details of them and seemingly understand them and get something out of them? Well, that’s a good sign because that means that at their heart, these ideas are things that anybody in the world who cares to understand them can understand.

Ray Briggs
So do you have a favorite of these ideas that you want to lay on us now?

Michael Shur
My favorite of them that I stumbled into was contractualism, I have to say. Contractualism is like this really pragmatic view of the world, which is, we share the world with other people. We cannot function without the cooperation and the understanding of other people. And in order to sort of lay out the rules by which we will all live If we need other people to agree to them, and that’s annoying, because other people are frequently very annoying, and it seems like a little bit of a pipe dream, it seems like a little bit of a fantasy land. But the way that it’s laid out in scanlines book, what we owe to each other is sort of like, let’s get down in the muck, let’s get down in the dirt and, and really like hammer this thing out. And it’s not going to result in a perfect utopian society where everybody’s holding hands. In fact, far from it, it’s going to result in a sort of bare minimum baseline of understanding of the rules we all agree to, I really found there to be something sort of beautiful in that idea. Honestly, it really sort of moved me to think that that would be the way that we would go about making rules. I don’t consider myself necessarily a contractual list. I think if I personally have any one philosophy that I adhere to, it’s closer to Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Josh Landy
I knew it ! He’s got a soft spot for virtue ethics.

Michael Shur
I do. And I find it and I write about this in the book a little bit. But I find virtue ethics to be the most forgiving of all of the philosophies, because built into virtue ethics is this idea that we’re going to sort of make mistakes all the time, we’re going to blow it, we’re going to try to do something, we think is the right thing to do. And we’re going to fail. And what it asks of us is no more than a sort of self examination, and a debrief and sort of understanding of, I was a little bit too much this way, or I wasn’t quite courageous enough, in that moment, or I was a little too angry in that moment, it’s pretty close to what a person who has no experience with philosophy at all would do. If that person, were trying to become a better person. It’s really just a sort of ongoing endless process of honing in and pruning the hedges and trying to get everything at the right level at the right balance. So I think I tend to live my life a little more like that. But the philosophy that sort of lit up lit a fire in my brain. The most probably was contractualism.

Josh Landy
That’s one of things I like about your book, How To Be perfect that, you know, it’s not afraid to get into difficult philosophical and moral territory. And one of the things I particularly resonated with in that regard is the the chapter about great art by bad people. Which is a really, really difficult topic. I’m so grateful to you for getting stuck in there. I mean, it reminds me of that documentary Kamau Bell made we need to talk about Cosby, where Cosby meant, and something really important to people. And so yes, on the one hand, you have to let it go in a certain sense, or you have to change your attitude, you have to change your attitude towards the person. But you can’t just pretend that that didn’t mean anything to you.

Michael Shur
Right, how many stand-up comedians became stand-up committee because they heard himself the album himself when they were seven years old, or whatever, like, you can’t, you can’t go back in time and undo that. But the problem is, is if you pretend that the second part of it doesn’t exist, the part of it were you now know that this person in Bill Cosby’s case did utterly horrifying things to hundreds of women over decades of his life? Well, now, you’re just saying that there are no consequences for bad behavior that people if they’re talented enough, can get away with whatever they want to get away with. That’s not any kind of society that anyone wants to live in either. So the best you can do is kind of remember both of these things at the same time, all the time. And the reason I think it’s hard to do that, and that people don’t want to do it, is because you to makes it impossible to go back and to experience that person’s art in the same way that you did when it was meaningful to you, right? You can’t there’s no pure interaction with that art anymore. And the answer to that is, well, tough, too bad. Like, that’s the deal. You just you can’t unlearn things about people, you can’t ignore them. And you’re right, that person has spoiled your feeling toward their art to some degree, and that’s the best we can do and I and look for unless you are completely just living under a rock. Like we all have these people, right, we we all have musicians and artists and painters and, you know, Symphony Orchestra conductors. I mean, there is no aspect of the sort of cultural tapestry that has not been deeply affected by this and, and more so recently than any time in history. So this is a thing we all have to grapple with. We all have to deal with. And I don’t really see another way around it.

Ray Briggs
So Michael, what is the correct answer to every moral question?

Michael Shur
As a kid who—I really love the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” I’m tempted just to say the correct answer is 42.

Josh Landy
Wait, this too? I’m sorry. You really are my long lost twin.

Michael Shur
I really hope Douglas Adams didn’t do anything awful. So I can still think of that book fondly. There’s no obviously there is no answer to every moral question. The closest again that I think you can come is, the answer is you got to care about whether or not you’re coming up with the right answer. And as long as you care, as long as you’re trying, that is sort of all that can be asked of any of us on this mortal plane.

Ray Briggs
Michael, thank you for the wonderful book and the wonderful conversation and for the good place. I still love Chidi so much.

Michael Shur
I’m glad to hear it. Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
Michael Schur, creator of TV’s “The Good Place” and author of “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and today we’re putting together our annual summer reading list.

Ray Briggs
Coming up, we’ll check on how things are going for effective altruists. And we’ll discuss listening in 19th century Russia.

Josh Landy
Thought provoking reading for your summer evenings—when Philosophy Talk continues.

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual summer reading show, generously sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. I’m Josh Landy here with my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs.

Ray Briggs
Last fall, we produced an episode exploring Effective Altruism, a moral theory about doing the most good you can.Our guest was pretty enthusiastic about it. But if you’ve been following some of the news over the last year is you could be forgiven for giving it a second look.

Josh Landy
Which is why we were pleased to see the publication this spring of “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism.” It was co edited by an old friend of the show, Wesleyan University philosopher Lori Gruen. We asked her to start by telling us what exactly Effective Altruism is.

George
Well, in a very short set of clauses, I can tell you that Effective Altruism is a view that we should use reason and empirical studies to try to determine the best way to direct our charitable giving.

Ray Briggs
That sounds like a great idea. But your new book says maybe it’s not as good as it sounds. So what’s the catch?

George
Yeah, so the book that I co edited with Carol Adams and Alice curry called the good at promises, the harm it does, really tries to reframe this very clear view that says, Look, we have a huge number of problems in the world that humans are causing. And the nice thing about Effective Altruism is it provides us with this very clear and seemingly obvious way of measuring how to do good in the world. And in this volume, we say, Ah, not so much. We are worried about a variety of different things that go wrong with this top down approach to doing good in the world.

Josh Landy
So one thing that came up fairly recently, in this context is the scandal around Sam Backman, fried who’s arguably become the most famous effective altruist not for great reasons, right? He was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering. What’s the worry there? I mean, is that is that just a kind of a coincidence, he happened to be an effective altruism, or is there a kind of worry about whether if you’re all in on Effective Altruism, you might think to yourself what a little bit of, you know, bending the rules may be okay, in the service of making money for charity.

George
Exactly right. And as we were putting the final touches on the book as it was going to production, that all blew up. And we thought, right, this is really a timely conversation to be having. Of course, when you have a simple view that the ends justify the means we know that we end up with some people and Sam Bateman freed is a good example, who really pushed the envelope under the guise of getting as much money as possible. He planned to give it all the way at least that’s what he said. And he is somebody who was motivated to do exactly what he did, by his commitments to Effective Altruism. Now, I’m not saying that at all effective altruists endorse what he did, of course, but it is one thing that’s not unpredictable, in extreme utilitarian view of how to get as much money as you can to give them as much money away as you can.

Ray Briggs
So I want to unpack this a little because I agree that Sam Venkman fried is a problem. And that thinking like any way of funneling money to your favorite charitable causes, like is justified thinking, thinking that any way of doing that is justified is also a problem. But you can imagine a sort of more restricted version of Effective Altruism, where there are certain rules you have to follow But within that, like you can’t embezzle money within those rules that you should give as effectively as possible. So why not just sort of step back to Effective Altruism but within rules?

George
Yes. I mean, obviously, we, we asked the contributors to this volume, to tell us what their experiences have been with effective altruists prior to the same Pegman fried uproar. And so the criticisms that we make collectively, and they’re quite variable in the volume are very much distinct from this more extreme point of view. If you’re following rules that allow you to sort of stay within, let’s say, the law in raising money, there’s nonetheless some serious problems that arise with Effective Altruism. One of the problems that arises is that there is an understanding that somehow you can measure effectiveness. And this really limits in many ways, the kind of efforts that one might support through their charitable giving. So for example, we have a number of contributors to the volume, who work in animal sanctuaries, animal sanctuaries are places where animals who have been used and abused in industrial systems go to live a dignified life, to develop relationships with others and to be cared for the effective altruists say this is not effective at all, this is a waste of money.

Josh Landy
Well, what’s their argument for that, it seems really strange that they would claim it doesn’t do any good.

George
You can’t measure the effectiveness that you’re doing by saving and caring for animals, it’s much more effective. For example, at one point, they have believed to devote energy towards building cage free animal production. So getting rid of cages in animal production, will miniscule li improve the well being of animals that are used in the system. But because there’s billions of animals used in the system, that very small marginal improvement in their well being added together becomes, in their view, a very large improvement. So one of the things that one way to think about, the difference is that effective altruists are happy to keep the systems in place, if there’s improvements that can be measured. And that does seem at odds with the kind of critique that we want to start with, which really is about the structure of these systems, and whether we need really kind of a more radical change.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, that’s the, for me, that’s been the most powerful criticism that I’ve come across of Effective Altruism, that it’s basically, you know, the biggest band aid in human history. And I mean, the same goes presumably not just in the world of factory farming, but also in the world of hedge funds, and, you know, crypto world and investment banking, because a lot of these folks in order to maximize their revenue so that they can give away the most go into these highly lucrative professions. But that means, of course, keeping those structures very much intact. Is that something that your volume also brings up, you know, that they they don’t tackle those structure, they don’t tackle the structures of our current mode of extractive capitalism?

George
Exactly. This is a BandAid on a system that is bleeding heavily. The extractive capitalism that we’re aware of is, is really causing such problems. So much harm, so much dignity violations, so much injury, so much environmental damage, that it’s really these structures that we really need to address. And in my chapter in the volume, I actually draw on some work from one of the early humanitarians, Gus Beth, who has also been arguing along these lines after working for 40 years in the humanitarian aid system, saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, we need some radical shift in how we’re thinking about how we might be able to fundamentally improve the lives of those who have been on the, let’s say, receiving end of extraction, those who have, whose labor whose land has been taken from them, and the value of that invested elsewhere. And I think these are old, old debates that have happened between what you might call revolution and reform. I think that to a large extent, what the effective altruists are doing is moving chairs around on an on a giant sinking vessel, where as what we really need is to rethink the system altogether. If we have any hope of allowing our children and grandchildren a Livable Future.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual summer reading special. And we’re talking to Laurie Gruen from Wesleyan University, co editor of “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism.”

Ray Briggs
One way of of thinking about the objection that you’re just explaining, is to think that what we need to do is to like bring about better consequences for the world. But like Effective Altruism just doesn’t give us the tools for measuring those consequences. Because the tools are kind of embedded in the same systems that are causing a bunch of harm. But I think not all of the essays in your volume, think of things that way. Like maybe ethics isn’t about bringing about the best consequences at all, like what are some other perspectives on like what I’m supposed to be doing?

George
Good. That’s a, you know, that is really one of the central questions. And for too long, ethical issues seem to be phrased in terms of, well, what consequences or what good consequences can you bring about how to maximize or satisfies those consequences, how to how to do something where we’re making one state of affairs, better visa vie the consequences, and for many of the contributors in the volume, that’s the wrong question to be asking. And if we think about the social and political relationships that we’re in, we’re often going to be asking questions about justice, we’re going to be asking questions about friendship, interspecies friendship, even, we’re going to be asking questions about dignity and dignity violations. What do people deserve? What do I owe people? These are questions that just focusing on consequences really can’t answer and don’t have the resources to answer these other fundamental value questions that I think are central not only to the lives that we we live, but also to our social reality. There are a variety of different kinds of values that really do not just motivate people, but provide meaning in their, in their work in their lives. And, and I think that consequentialism and focusing on consequences really ignores these important values.

Josh Landy
But could we salvage anything from Effective Altruism? I mean, I know someone, for example, who came very close to giving away a kidney was just sort of, you know, denied at the last minute for medical reasons, but he wanted to give a kidney away to a stranger, and he would have done so. And he was motivated by reading Peter Singer, and by, you know, by various strands of Effective Altruism. So is there some good in it? And could we preserve that good while still warding off the damage?

George
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting space for having a conversation like that. And some of the contributors in our volume are arguing in those ways. They think that yes, sure. Some version of Effective Altruism may be a really useful one, maybe when you’re thinking about motivation, many people are motivated for in a variety of ways. And so one thing you might imagine is that some people are motivated by a kind of consequential exchange. And if you’re motivated in that way, these kinds of arguments would be useful. And some of the some of the folks in our volume argue that, for example, one way that the effective altruists might be able to do a lot of good and bring about good consequences. But that escapes, they’re usually their purview is by focusing on really important changes in black communities and other communities that don’t have access to all sorts of resources that may that many others do in our own country or in other sort of fairly wealthy places, it’s a lot easier if you’re doing it. Effective Altruism, in its more abstract, more popular way to think, Oh, well, I can use this dollar to buy a whole lot more resources for poor people in poor countries than in my own country, for example. So I’m more I’m going to not focus on, you know, underprivileged neighborhoods in San Francisco or Washington DC, or Baltimore or New York, I’m going to focus on poor communities in India or in Africa, because my dollar can do more good there. And you could see already you’re starting to really support a kind of system that already is predisposed to injure, and ignore and overlook many, many people.

Ray Briggs
One thing that kind of strikes me about the the change between where Effective Altruism started out, and some of the like problems that you’ve been pointing out, is that a lot of Effective Altruism, I think, started out from critiques of, like, ineffective charities that were good critiques were like, there’s this correct observation that a lot of like charitable giving, is more about making the person To give money feel good than it is about helping anybody. And I wonder if you think that there’s something to that insight that could also be preserved.

George
So I think that there is important ways of thinking. So one of the issues that gets a little bit confused, in my view, in these discussions about charitable giving, have to do with the metrics that you measure how effective the charitable giving is. Now, effective altruists have a very specific way of understanding what those metrics should look like you should do the most good that you can with the capital or the money that you have. And that I think, is quite different from some other critiques that came about which are, wait, if this particular charity or organization is doing, saying they’re going to do good, but they’re spending most of their money on salaries, or not really doing the work that they said they were going to do, maybe that charity should be interrogated. I also think though, and I really want to bring this up, because it comes out in my chapter as well, there’s a whole nother way of thinking about, if you will, the sort of giving ecosystem and one is to think about it in terms of solidarity or mutual aid, as opposed to charity, where I have all this money, and I’m gonna raise all this money so that I can, from on high give this money to someone else rather than to imagine that we’re in this kind of ecosystem. And there are these new solidarity economies developing even in the arts world that I think provide us with a different way of understanding what our social relationships shouldn’t look like. They’re not just these exchanges, efficient exchanges, but rather, together we can build something meaningful and transformative.

Josh Landy
Lori, I want to ask one last question about the potential harms of of Effective Altruism, which comes up quite a bit, which is their longtermism. If I understand correctly, many effective altruists these days are thinking about the very distant future. Again, because of their commitments to utilitarianism, if you sort of multiply up all of the moments of happiness of all of the human beings that will ever exist, then it starts to look like the long term health of the human species outweighs a lot of current concerns. But if you go too far down that route, it seems like you could land in some trouble. Is that kind of trouble, something that your volume brings up too?

George
Well, right. So longtermism is something that we we touch on at the very end, it became much, much more popular in the last year when one of the founders of Effective Altruism released a book. And there was quite a publicity campaign funded by Sam big and free, as it turns out, and the idea is really exactly as you say that there is a sense and this goes back to a philosopher Derek Parfit. It’s insights that ultimately, if there are if the human population is going to grow massively, and and the theory is that it will when we colonize space, another whole set of issues. But that we ought to be focusing our current attention on these future people, because there’s going to be so many more of them. Now, even Peter Singer, you know, another founder of effective altruists, is quite skeptical about this particular kind of consequentialist trade off it because it would actually mean that we might allow a lot of harm and suffering now, for some imagined future pleasures or good that might arise in the future. And I think that there’s just too much I think, from his point of view, and I think for many people’s point of view, there’s just too much uncertainty about being able to actually determine what kind of existential risks are worth avoiding in some distant future. And so I think that is long term ism is, in some ways, a really controversial version of Effective Altruism.

Josh Landy
Laurie, it’s a fascinating book, and this was an equally fascinating conversation. Thanks so much for joining us today.

George
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me in talking about these really tricky issues.

Josh Landy
Laurie Gruen from Wesleyan University, one of the editors of “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and today we’re compiling our annual summer reading.

Ray Briggs
Coming up: summer reading suggestions from listeners, plus writers trying to capture the voices of regular people before they could be recorded.

Josh Landy
More summer reading—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Today it’s our annual summer reading episode—thought-provoking books for thoughtful summer reading.

Josh Landy
Let’s hear from a listener who wrote in with a suggestion. George in San Francisco, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

George
Morning.

Ray Briggs
So you’ve got a book to recommend for us. Can you tell us about that book?

George
That book is “Victory City,” the most recent novel by Salman Rushdie.

Josh Landy
And what happens in this novel?

Gabriella Safran
It’s set between the 14th and 16th centuries in southern India. It’s a fairy tale. So a lot of supernatural occurrences occur. They’re goddesses and kind of driving the narrative. A young woman a child really is her tribe is defeated in battle, all the men have died and the women in mass walk into a fire and a collective act of self immolation. The Goddess witnesses is one of the local goddesses there and imbues this child with possesses the child in a way, so that she later drives the events of the story. And there’s a framing story in which the narrator is actually recovering a text that has been buried for centuries, that had been originally composed by the central protagonist who is this woman who, twice a queen, long time in exile lives through those centuries, she lives like 247 years and receives this boon to this very long life, which is contains its own negation, you might say in the sense that it’s great to live a long life nonetheless, she a little very long life, but she is young through much of it. And she’s remained young and beautiful through a lot of her turn 47 years. Of course, the drawback is that she sees all the people she loves age and die, including, importantly, her three daughters.

Josh Landy
So can you tell us why our Philosophy Talk listeners would be particularly interested—what’s philosophical about this novel?

Gabriella Safran
There’s something maybe anachronistic I can’t, I can’t say whether the themes of female empowerment and religious pluralism which are all rusty or anachronistic to a story that very much plays out like a epic, antique kind of tale. There’s those things, there’s the nature of kingship and queenship.

Ray Briggs
I would definitely say that I don’t think religious pluralism is anachronistic—like, that’s an old theme.

Gabriella Safran
Well, that’s just the question because there’s a great deal of allegory embedded in the story. So you got your magic, and you got your realism, right.

Josh Landy
It’s Rushdie. If you had to give people a 20-second pitch on why they have to rush out and buy “Victory City” by Salman Rushdie and read it for over the summer. What would you say what would be your 20-second sales pitch for it?

Gabriella Safran
It’s just a ripping good yarn. It’s a fantastic fairy tale told by a master storyteller at the height of his abilities and powers. There’s not a dull paragraph in it. But it’s very erudite, and you really makes you think about a lot of things.

Ray Briggs
George, thank you so much for joining us today.

George
Hey, thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s annual summer reading special. Now if you’re a middle class writer who wants to give a voice to the voiceles, how do you do it? Written language is kind of a minefield.

Ray Briggs
Well, that’s something Gabriela Safran has been thinking about. She is professor of Slavic languages and literature’s at Stanford University. Her new book is called “Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century.” Gabriella, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Gabriella Safran
Thank you.

Josh Landy
Gabriela, your book “Recording Russia,” it’s all about mid 19th century Russian writers trying to capture the voice of the people. So what was that about?

Gabriella Safran
You know, it was about the sense that intellectuals that we can call elites began to have in the mid 19th century, that there’s a lot of other people out there that they hadn’t been listening to, but maybe they need to listen to them.

Ray Briggs
Right. So what why did this become such a concern in the 19th century?

Gabriella Safran
I mean, I think partly for political reasons. Because this is you know, the time when we’re nearing the end of chattel slavery, serfdom is going to be abolished in in the 1860s. It’s, it’s also a time when there’s a kind of media boom. So so it becomes more politically urgent to Hear what lower class people have to say. And it becomes more possible to imagine that the things they have to say can be recorded, and, and circulated.

Josh Landy
I think it’s a really interesting question you raise in your, in your book, this question of whether it can make a political difference, like how people write their novels, for example, right. Victor Hugo, and around the same period in France, said, Jimmy Zamboni, who’s Rovio? Dictionnaire, I put a revolutionary hat on the dictionary. So some people seem to have that belief that you could actually change the world by by changing your language. So are these writers over optimistic in the power of various sort of formal choices in in writing to make a difference in the world? Or did in fact, these books make a difference?

Gabriella Safran
I mean, I think that these writers had a sense that they could reach people who were able to make important decisions. And and that was correct. You know, the writers that I look at this sort of mid 19th century Russian writers tended to be themselves, Imperial administrators. They worked for these Rs government in one way or another. They were bureaucrats as well as writers or they knew bureaucrats. And they knew that their writing couldn’t really reach people who could make changes. I think the biggest the most famous kind of story of a change being made because of writing is Ivana ganja, wrote a set of stories, notes of a hunter, about traveling through the countryside and eating serfs and talking to them. And the stories demonstrate the serfs are real people, they should be free. It’s terrible that they are that they are effectively enslaved and served. And some of those stories, folklore says some of those stories were read by Alexander the second and prompted him to, to push for the elimination of serfdom.

Ray Briggs
Wow, that’s, that’s a pretty incredible impact to have. But I think like one worry I would have if I were doing this is like making the right impact. So ending serfdom seems like a good call. But how do you make sure that you’re listening to the right voices? Like how do you get the right information out of people?

Gabriella Safran
That’s really what my book is about: how do you how do you do this thing, listening to and recording across social lines? And what interests me is that my writers, the writers I look at, understand that there are so many ways they could do this wrong. They they grasp that, you know, maybe you’re going to listen to, to serfs or peasants, who are not representative who whose stories don’t matter. Maybe you’re going to maybe they’re gonna they’re not going to tell you the truth. Maybe you’re going to use language wrong in in recording what they say either you’ll make them sound too foci or not foci enough. And both of those would be bad.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And your book, “Recording Russia,” also presents some of these debates as precursors of conversations that we’re having today about similar things you say a little bit about that?

Gabriella Safran
Yeah, you know, there’s ways in which I think the debates that my writers are are having are, they kind of anticipate some of the debates people have today about cultural appropriation, or whether wokeness is performative. I think my writers, these mid 19th century Russian writers are quite sophisticated thinkers about the question of whether a person from one class or social group has a right to tell and profit from the stories of someone in another social group. And they’re also very sophisticated thinkers about the question of when a person, an elite person might be sort of talking about showing how they are recording and listening to and recording the voice of the people in a way that’s really performative. That’s meant to to get attention. That’s a kind of virtue signaling.

Josh Landy
You know, another thing that your book reminded me off in the contemporary context, is those endless New York Times stories where a journalist talks to so called regular folks in rural diners you know, the people who think climate change is a hoax or Obama, Obama is a Muslim, or, you know, vaccines are gonna kill you. And, and it just cements the notion that real Americans look a certain way. And I wonder if there’s something similar, they’re similar worries. In mid 19th century Russia that, you know, these writers are going out and talking to people whose voices hadn’t been maybe represented enough before. But you know, are there worries about selection. You know, do people keep going to sort of the same, the same towns and talking to the same kinds of people? And not really including the great diversity of voices around Russia? Is that a worry in the in the mid 19th century?

Gabriella Safran
Yeah, I ferl like you’vw said two things I want to answer. One is, you know, are these writers trying to look good or are they creating change? I think we can’t really make that that bifurcation. I think one can be trying to look good, and really creating change the same time, and we lead ourselves astray. If you think we think it’s either one or the other. Then the question of who are the real people? Absolutely. They argue about this constantly. And they argue really along the same lines as we do. You know, there’s, on the one hand, a sense of the real people in quotation marks are rural agricultural workers far away from the capitals. And and then there’s other people saying, Wait, maybe the maybe urban workers are just as real. Exactly. Definitely a debate that happens in the mid 19th century using very similar language and ideas to what we would recognize today.

Ray Briggs
And do you have people sort of selectively Amplifying Voices in ways that kind of echo their own political sensibilities saying, Oh, the people happen to think what I think like, is that a thing that happened in 19th century Russia as well as now?

Gabriella Safran
Yeah, you have people who are upset that other people’s that other say writers, stories about the countryside amplify the voices of women who are beaten by their husbands. If you write a story that amplifies that, then you suggest that there’s kind of something wrong with this Russian peasant culture that you’re that you’re describing. And that might fit with your own maybe proto feminist views. And feminism was an important part of Russian kind of intellectual culture in the mid 19th century. But you know, other other people might say to you don’t don’t amplify those voices amplify some other voices, the countryside is, you know, a beautiful place and peasant culture is beautiful. And why draw so much attention to these to these women? Okay, maybe sometimes women are beaten by their husbands, but let’s not, let’s not draw so much attention to it.

Ray Briggs
So I guess this raises a kind of big philosophical question for me about whether the people can be said to have a voice like if you have like a peasant woman, and her husband, who is beating her, each of those people has a point of view, is there like a thing? That is the point of view of all the peasants that incorporates both of those?

Gabriella Safran
Yeah, I mean, that that’s really that was the question that haunted me throughout writing this book? You know, I feel that my instinct is, of course not. Of course, there’s no voice of the people. Of course, there are only voices of individuals. And and I think that a lot of the kind of competition among the writers, I look at each one trying to be better than the others at listening to and recording the voice of the people. I think a lot of that competition stemmed from an anxiety that that came from their their recognition, their sense that maybe there was no voice of the people, and no one could really record it correctly. And maybe we have to just wait for, you know, individual people of peasant origin, which is something that did happen in the 1870s and 80s. individual people, individual peasants started to say, well, this is my story. This is my story. You know, individuals can speak for themselves, maybe better than for a group. So that’s my instinct. At the same time, I grasp that maybe maybe my instinct is a kind of classically, you know, more liberal one. And I am nervous about the idea of, of collective voices. And maybe there’s times in places in which such believing feeling that there is someone speaking for people, maybe sometimes that’s that’s appropriate or necessary, but I have a kind of rejection of that instinctive rejection.

Josh Landy
Well, this has been a lovely and wonderful, inspiring conversation. Thank you so much, Gabriella, for joining us today.

Gabriella Safran
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Josh Landy
Our Stanford colleague Gabriela Safran, author of “Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century.”

Ray Briggs
You can find all the books we’ve talked about on today’s show, along with other recommendations from our listeners, over at our website, philosophytalk.org

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Jamie Lee, Elizabeth Zhu, Emily Huang. Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers at our online Community of Thinkers. Support for this episode comes from the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed_ on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and spend the summer swimming in our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.