Summer Reading List 2018

Ken Taylor
What books should people read this summer?

Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything… except, of course, your intelligence.

I’m Ken Taylor, here at the studios of KALW San Francisco, continuing conversations that begin on the Stanford campus at Philosophers Corner.

Well, I’m going to spend some of my time this summer doing some philosophy. Today, it’s our annual summer reading show. It’s our guide to thought-provoking books for thoughtful people like you to read this summer. Now, later in the show, we’ll hear from some of you from our Community of Thinkers who have written into us with suggestions of your own for summer reading. We’ll also spend some time talking to one of our favorite thinkers—that’s cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, about his controversial new book, “Enlightenment Now.” In just a bit, I’ll be joined by my colleague and co-host Debra Satz, and we’ll also be joined by our host emeritus, John Perry. John asked me and Debra to recommend some books to him to help him get over his depression at our current political situation. Now,summer is a great time for reading. But with so many choices out there, some people just don’t know how to pick a book. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Veporter, Liza Veale, to talk to someone who does matchmaking between people and books. She files this report.

Liza Veale
Okay, I’ve brought some fictional clients to two various special, very powerful book healers, Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Louise McCune. You’ll hear the problem the client is suffering from, then the doctors will prescribe a book, then you’ll hear a little passage from that book. So let’s hear our first client.

Client 1
My relationship fell apart. And I’m, I’m just feeling completely jaded, like love is a neurochemical con. And I’ll never fall for it again.

Liza Veale
Your recommendation, Hannah?

Hannah Kingsley-Ma
I don’t know if books can make you feel like love is worth believing in. But I do think the book “Light of the World” by Elizabeth Alexander, who’s a poet, and this is her memoir about the death of her husband. It’s just a really beautiful book about their specific relationship. And it’s really nice to live in that world.

Liza Veale
So that was “The Light of the World” by Elizabeth Alexander: “He who believed in the lottery, He who did not leave a large carbon footprint. He who never met a child, he didn’t even chant he whose children made him laugh until he cried. He who never told a lie. He who majored in physics who knew the laws of the universe, He who wanted to win the lottery for me.”

Client 2
My band broke up after seven years because we needed to get real jobs. I just feel lost without it.

Liza Veale
Dr. Louise?

Louise McCune
I would recommend “The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick. She interviewed a lot of people who were part of the American Communist Party during the Cold War. It’s just really interesting to see how they remember an experience that was all consuming. And that felt, to many of them. A little bit irrelevant, in hindsight.

Liza Veale
That was “The Romance of American Communism” by Vivian Gornick: “Sure, there was a lot of shit in the Communist Party and a lot of shitty, people but the only times I felt life was great. We’re in the CP, despite everything life had meaning it redeemed itself over and over again and redeemed itself because it had real meaning. And while I was a part of it, I had real meaning.”

Client 3
I just feel lonely. And I feel that way even when I’m with people.

Hannah Kingsley-Ma
I would recommend “The Lonely City” by Olivia Lange. It’s a biography of several different artists living in New York City who have experienced intense loneliness. And it’s not like a really comforting book. It acknowledges the significance of loneliness and how loneliness is a generative force.

Liza Veale
“The Lonely City” by Olivia Lange: “What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry, like being hungry when everyone around you is ready in for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming. It advances is what I’m trying to say—cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing an engulfing.”

Client 4
I have to make a big choice in my life. And I’m paralyzed by indecision.

Hannah Kingsley-Ma
Yeah, I sort of feel like indecision is like the same as when people talk loud about how they feel like eating a brownie. You know, it’s like we all have that thought. And it’s hard for To be interesting to other people. That’s what I think makes this book by Sheila Heti, “Motherhood,” so special is that she makes it a indecision, an interesting place to sit in somebody else’s indecision, and it’s specifically about her decision whether or not to have a child. So she’s trying to root out what the right answer is.

Liza Veale
“Motherhood” by Sheila Heti: “Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself. It is the greatest secret I keep from myself.”

Hannah Kingsley-Ma
The point of the book really is that when you’re undecided, are you actually undecided? Or are you just wrestling with something you’ve known for a long time?

Liza Veale
Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that report, Liza. I’m Ken Taylor. And today we’re compiling Philosophy Talk’s annual summer reading list. I’m joined now by my co-host, Debra Satz. And we’ve got a special guest, John Perry, our host emeritus. John, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

John Perry
Well, actually, I’m here to get your advice. Well, mainly Debra’s’s advice. You’re willing to chime in. You know, I got my PhD in 1968. And I’ve taught for 50 or so years, all without reading the classics of political philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Really? Yeah. Do you want to spend your summer catching up?

John Perry
I want to spend my summer sitting on my dock up and Copperopolis catching up.

Ken Taylor
Why do you want to do this? Because do you want to think more clearly about our current political situation? Are you working on a book? I mean, what what drives you to want to do this?

John Perry
Well, it would be nice in thinking about all the things wrong with what Debra calls American democracy. To have some alternative conception of how I think things should be.

Debra Satz
I’m going to give two books to begin with. You know, so Locke, who’s often seen as the inspiration of American democracy is worth thinking about because he has this idea of government under the law. And that’s an idea that is currently under some challenges, and thinking about the basis of limited government of what constrains what governments ought to do to us what kinds of entitlements we have.

John Perry
Soyou’re talking about Two Treatises .

Debra Satz
Yes, the first treatise is an argument against the divine right of kings, arguing with Filmer.

John Perry
You know what. Russell’s political philosophy was. He says Locke was clearly right about the divine right of kings. But look, here we are a couple of centuries later, and we still believe in the divine right of people to have a lot of money.

Debra Satz
Well, that brings me to my second suggestion, which is that I think you are to read Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. And Rousseau is thinking about whether or not large amounts of inequality are compatible with our standing as free and equals.

John Perry
Alright, I have another question about reading: libertarianism. My son is a libertarian. When I hear him talk about it sounds vaguely reasonable. So I tried to read libertarians. So I started Ayn Rand, “The Virtue of Selfishness.” And then I discovered some I did some research. Did you know that Ayn Rand was not a founding father?

Ken Taylor
Or a founding mother for that matter!

John Perry
Somehow just kind of listening to Paul Ryan and I had got it in my head that she was the only woman that signed the Constitution. So I got about halfway through this drivel, The Virtue of Selfishness, which seems to me to have no basis—it’s kind of like Hobbes, it has really no basis in evolution, as we know understand it. Selfishness means always just kind of a surprise, evolutionarily speaking. So Nozick, turned to Nozick. Well, I read the first couple of chapters, and I was ready to give South Dakota back to the Native Americans. But if you’re not willing to do that, I don’t see why there’s anything there. I mean, what am I doing wrong?

Ken Taylor
That Nozick book is called “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.”

Debra Satz
Yeah, so those strongest versions of libertarianism are actually not found in philosophy, but in economics, and so if you wanted to read something, you know, that made some sense of the libertarian perspective, I would say read Milton Friedman, “Capitalism and Freedom” or Hayek.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I was gonna say. “The Road to Serfdom” right?

Debra Satz
Or “The Constitution of Liberty”

Ken Taylor
I have a question for you. So there’s a rise of populism around the world. Are there any philosophers or political thinkers who have theorized fruitfully about that?

Debra Satz
Yeah, there’s a professor of politics at Princeton who’s been writing on populism. His name is Jan Verner Mueller, and he’s trying to diagnose the, you know, the challenges that populism poses to democracy and he thinks of populism not as a movement to enhance democracy but as a great threat to democracy.

John Perry
There was a book by Richard Hofstadter, I think, called something like “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which I must admit I haven’t read all the way through. But it seemed kind of to touch a nerve that’s related to populism.

Debra Satz
So there’s a you know, a bunch of books that have been coming out. There’s a really fine book by Larry Bartels, little bit dated now, “Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.” Marty Gilens has a book on, you know, democracy and inequality. Tim Scanlon just wrote a book on why does equality matter.

Ken Taylor
Do you think that any of the sort of founding fathers and mothers of democratic political theory, you know, the Hobbes the Lockes, the Rousseaus—did they anticipate these kinds of? And did they think through ways of safe—can you will you find the wisdom in the classics that will say, Ah, here’s what we need to do in this age to avoid a collapse?

John Perry
Well, they were all writing don’t want you mentioned before the Industrial Revolution

Debra Satz
Exactly. Right. Exactly. So they’re, yeah, they, you know, capitalism at that time was very, very different than it’s become today. It wasn’t the age of, you know, when they’re writing, if there’s even the beginnings of capitalism, there’s no monopoly. There’s no really asymmetric power between the merchant class and, you know, the workers, most people don’t even have the vote. It’s pre-democracy.

Ken Taylor
So they’re not going to help us solve…

Debra Satz
But they’ve got I think there’s a lot of insight to be gleaned from some of the classics on what are the economic preconditions of a democracy. So you could think about Locke is writing you have to, you know, that there are some economic preconditions of our being able to rule ourselves as equals. Rousseau is a more demanding view of that. Rawls is a, you know, as demanding view of that, you know, they put a lot of constraints, you know, and see inequality as a huge threat to democracy. And if you go forward, and you think about the great theorists of the welfare state, like T.H. Marshall and R.H. Tawney—Tawney’s book on equality would be a fantastic source for thinking about—

Ken Taylor
So you’re sayinh to those who are triumphal presentist the classics do not go silent on us when they’re when they’re going gets hard. I mean, the going is hard for democracy right now.

Debra Satz
Now, we’ve actually would benefit we’ve lost touch with what used to be seen as mainstream ideas in political philosophy, like 100% tax on inheritance, which was a very popular idea in the 19th century among political theorists is gone from our political discussion. So I think it’s sometimes it’s eye opening to see the things that we take off the table. Were front and center to earlier theorists.

Ken Taylor
So has this helped, John?

John Perry
Yes, I’m gonna start with Rousseau, I’ll buy the Hackett translation, whoever did it,I’m sure it’s good. See, I think you’re wrong. It’s not that you’re more morose about democracy than I am. It’s like, there’s these stages of loss. You’re in the early stages of denial, maybe it’s not possible that she’s gone. I’m in the late stages. You know, I just want to pay for the gravestone and be done with it.

Bob Dylan
We live in a political world. Love don’t have any place. We’re living in times where men commit crimes and crime don’t have a face.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re putting together our annual summer reading list. Coming up. My colleague, Josh Landy and I will talk to the author of a book that’s on both our summer reading lists: “Enlightenment Now” by the one and only Steven Pinker from Harvard University—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back to the program. It’s the summer reading list edition of Philosophy Talk. I’m Ken Taylor, here with my Stanford colleague and co-host, Josh Landy.

Josh Landy
So one book that’s on both cans and my summer reading list, which we’ve both already started is “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker joins us now. Welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Steven Pinker
Thank you.

Ken Taylor
So Steve, your book, I think, is a hot book. It’s a highly controversial book. I mean, you could agree with parts of it or disagree with parts of it. But there’s raging controversy, at least among academics about your book. Why do you think that is?

Steven Pinker
Yeah, you wouldn’t think that a book that defended enlightenment values and that said that science reason and humanism or good thing this would be so blatantly controversial, but it has made people’s heads explode.

Josh Landy
I wonder whether partly it’s because you’ve been misunderstood on many grounds. I mean, it’s people seem to be thinking, for example, that you’re saying everything is great today, and there’s nothing to worry about.

Steven Pinker
That’s right. I think that people really don’t have a coherent concept of progress, that they equate progress with the idea that everything is perfect. Everything has been getting better everywhere, for everyone all the time. And that wouldn’t be progress, that’d be a miracle. That just cannot happen. The sensible way to deal with progress is, if you were to be incarnated as a person at any time in history, What time would you would you pick this is Barack Obama’s presumably adaptation of John Rawls, all right, for the veil of ignorance, and Obama answered it as right now. And that’s one way, if you’re playing the odds, if you’re going by the averages, then that that would suggest that you choose now simply because now’s the time when the people live the longest, are most likely to live in a democracy are most likely to live at peace are least likely to get murdered, most likely to be educated are likely to have the greatest amount of leisure time, greatest access to culture, and many other criteria. Now, again, it doesn’t mean everyone everywhere, it doesn’t mean that everything has been getting better. But it means that more things have been getting better than than getting worse.

Josh Landy
I think that’s a reason I mean, this. I mean, I’m putting words in your mouth. Tell me if this is right. The reason you’re writing this book, is because not everyone has yet fully benefited. So we need to keep these values alive.

Steven Pinker
Exactly right. One of the—My favorite data in the book is the fact that extreme poverty has declined by 50% in just three decades, so that less than 10% of the world’s population today is living in extreme poverty. 200 years ago, it was 90%. So the figures have reversed and even just several decades ago, it was 30%. Now another way of saying the same making the same point is to say that seven more than 700 million people today live in extreme poverty. Now those aren’t contradictory. They’re the same statistic and it is a tragedy and an outrage that 700 People million people live in extreme poverty, but it’s better than several billion people.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s certainly true, but I Okay, so I am a big believer in progress and enlightenment values and all that. But I want to throw some I want to throw a line at you. From Wordsworth. Great God. I’d rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, so might I standing on this pleasantly have glimpses that would make me less for Lorne have side of Proteus rising from the sea, or hero Triton blow is read at home. Now the point about that is he thinks, you know, the world has been sullied by the growth of capitalism and all this sort of stuff. And it’s been disenchanted and de romanticized. And that there’s more to human life than material progress, and that the advancement of material progress can come at a cost. That’s, I think, possibly one strand of resistance. I don’t think that’s the the main thing, but that’s one strand, what do you think about that?

Steven Pinker
Well several things one is the progress doesn’t just consist of improvement of material standards of living. But on the other hand, if you’re starving if your kids die, definitely, if you die in your 40s, that’s a an awful lot of the rest of life, all the good things in life, however you define them, that you can’t enjoy if you’re starving if you’re dead, if you’re sick, so we shouldn’t sneer at material progress insofar as it allows people to live longer, more comfortable, healthier lives. Most of us would consider education, knowledge, literacy, access to the printed word as one of the good things in life that’s not the same as material progress. On the other hand, schools cost money and books cost money and, and supporting artists like Wordsworth costs money. That’s the kind of thing you can do in an affluent society, not so much in a society where everyone’s living in extreme poverty. So the attitude of artists and intellectuals that material well being is crass, something to be smeared at.

Ken Taylor
Well not to be sneered at but not sufficient, for absolutely a measure of a well lived life of a well organized society.

Steven Pinker
So true, but on the other hand, it does, it may be a necessary condition for it. Oh, so yeah, definitely. I don’t see what’s so terrible, the disenchantment of the world, the old demon haunted world in which you had to worry about damnation in hell and eternal torment, in which there were the possibility of the Evil Eye watching your every move, listening to your every word. So that’s true. So there were ghosts and demons and spirits and things that go bump in the night. Good guy stole that.

Ken Taylor
But there is a worry, I think about the onslaught of scientific rationality, not doing something that old forms of human cognition did. It narrated the world for us in ways that were potentially enlivening, enlivening and uplifting, and I hear you striving to give us a narrative that’s scientifically based. That is awesome. uplifting and enlivening, but that’s a very non trivial thing. And I have to say philosophers and others haven’t done much of a job at that.

Steven Pinker
But yeah, I think the the the idea that if we understand the world, if we apply rationality, if we disabuse ourselves of falsehoods, then we somehow made life meaningless. I think that’s exactly backwards. We don’t want to find meaning and things that are that are false narratives that are contradicted by our best understanding of the cosmos. And there’s plenty of meaning to be found in the course of human progress. The fact that the universe is indifferent to our suffering, that the things fall apart, the entropy increases. Evolution did not have our well being in mind when it shaped us and other organisms. Organisms we depend on for food don’t want to be eaten, but we’ve got to sustain ourselves. Anyway. There. There are billions of types of organisms that make a living at their expense, germs and pathogens. But we vanquish we’re vanquishing them, we’re living longer, we’re combating scourges that made life miserable for our ancestors, since we emerged as a species. Yeah, I find that glorious, I find it uplifting.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talks. It’s our annual summer reading show. And we’re talking to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker about his new book, “Enlightenment Now.”

Ken Taylor
There’s another thing, what some people take to be the kind of political consequences of your way of looking at things. For example, you talk about income inequality, and how, you know, it’s, I mean, you could read, you’re saying, as well, there is incoming inequality. But that’s not the worst thing because it’s the de munition of world poverty and all this stuff that really matters. I mean, people taken as a collectivity are much better off. It’s kind of male distributed here and there, right. And but income equality is inequality is not the corrosive thing that some people on the left, take it to be. And they don’t like that thought, that’s a retrograde, anti-progressive thought.

Steven Pinker
That’s right. And here we’re on Philosophy Talk, I’m going to credit a couple of philosophers who influenced me in that argument. One is Harry Frankfort, who had a lovely short book on inequality. And Derek Parfit, who has written at length about it. Yet the it’s not that income inequality is is good or completely innocuous, especially since it can contribute to genuine problems like capture of the political process by by the wealthy, the danger of plutocracy. But what morally counts as not inequality, per se, but poverty. And they’re not the same thing. As long as economies are not zero sum. As long as it’s not the case that if some people have more necessarily other people have less, and that what should engage us morally is the the well being of the of the worst off. For many intellectuals, there is a background assumption that to be morally serious, you’ve got to be opposed to the major institutions of our society. This is something that goes back to the 19th century, but was but really was accelerated in the 1960s. And to say that our institutions have done more good than harm or that we should reform them as opposed to demolishing them. It’s kind of seen as being kind of a patsy of the establishment is not being that whether a serious intellectual has to do is oppose the modern institutions. Ironically, that is a theme that was taken up by the Trumpian, right? The idea that we have to drain the swamp and burn the Empire to the ground, smash the machine, on the assumption that our institutions are so corrupt and degenerate, that they’re beyond reform, what we’ve got to do is demolish them out of the hope that anything that arises from the ashes is bound to be better than what we have now.

Josh Landy
Right. That’s, I mean, that’s one of the things I love is that you know, your diagnosis if this kind of cynicism pessimism, right, I mean, I take it that that it comes from a desire not to be hoodwinked to take an end by snake oil salesman, but but there’s a kind of hoodwinking on the other side, right, all these hermeneutics of suspicion, you know, they are actually being sold a bill of goods to I mean, I take it that you have a kind of a warning that they’re there, Steve, that there are negative consequences that follow from having this, this cynical attitude?

Steven Pinker
Oh, absolutely. Because we have very good reason to believe that that radical revolutions could lead to tremendous harm to the Chinese Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, for that matter, and that there are just so many ways for things to go wrong that if you have a halfway decent functioning society, if more people are trying to get in then or been racing for the exits, if the streets aren’t running with blood if obesity is a bigger problem and starvation, historically unique circumstance suggests that that we really shouldn’t raise our institutions, we should absolutely reform them. And there are many opportunities for making things work better, and perhaps making the income tax more steeply graduated so that wealthy people pay a greater share is certainly part of that. So it doesn’t mean accepting the status quo. But it does mean, acknowledging how many ways there are for things to go wrong.

Ken Taylor
I definitely agree with you. But yeah, there’s an arrogance among humankind, I want to ask you a broader philosophical question, you’re a fan of reason. As moi, you’re also a cognitive scientist, who studies the foibles of the human mind. Because what we want like to do, we’d like to attribute all the successes of human cognition to reason, right? And all of the unsuccess is all of the dark turns, there’s something other than reason, Descartes believed that there is within the resonant in the human mind this thing he called a universal instrument, suitable for all contingencies, right? It can reason about means the end, it can do mathematical reasoning into philosophical, there’s a single instrument in there, the evolutionary psychologist come along and say, well, the minds massively modular, this Cartesian universal instrument doesn’t exist, the Enlightenment seem to buy into the idea of his Cartesian universal instrument, you as a cognitive scientist seems strangely to me to buy into this the existence of this universal instrument, or am I misreading you?

Steven Pinker
Well, I think we’ve got that there may not be a dispassionate logical reasoning module in the brain, it may be that we combined bits that we take from a variety of modules, using our ability to learn to combine, I mean, one of the aspects of cognition that that I’ve emphasized the most is the ability to combine ideas in propositions recursively, so that we can have an infinite number of combinations of simpler thoughts. And to extend them and logically to take, for example, our concepts of space and motion and apply them to abstract states ought to take our notion of physical force and apply it to abstract causality. So the combination of abstraction and combinatorics, we can take ideas propositions that emerge from various modules and try to bleach them of their content in terms of physical objects pushing each other around and people manipulating each other, and come up with kind of skeletons that then serve as a scaffolding.

Ken Taylor
Josh wants to get in here.

Josh Landy
And yeah, it sounds like you’re saying that as a collective enterprise, right, as a community of thinkers, we can work together to overcome individual biases is—is that a fair way of thinking about it?

Steven Pinker
completely. That’s exactly what I’m saying that we have the capability because Because human cognition does have this power of combinatorics, and abstraction, it can be pulled out and developed and accumulated in institutions where collectively, we latch on to ways of adapting our cognition that seemed to correspond to rationality and the real world.

Ken Taylor
Do you think we have the modes of collective reasoning, collective problem solving, global governance are something global that actually are fit for this? I mean, I think we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where our evolved brains together with our culturally developed social structures and political structures aren’t adequate to the task.

Steven Pinker
We don’t know the answer. I think we do have the the mechanisms whether we’ll implement them, I cannot prophesy, but we’re certainly capable of it. The means are in place.

Josh Landy
Well, Steve, from your lips to the administration’s ears is likely. Listen, I’m so excited to finish reading, “Enlightenment Now,” I think it’s a really important and extremely timely book and Steve Pinker, thanks so much for joining us.

Steven Pinker
Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be on the show.

Ken Taylor
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of “Enlightenment Now,” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual summer reading episode. After a short break, Josh and I will talk to another friend of the show with a new book on our list of summer reading, and we’ll take suggestions from our community of thinkers—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back,. We’re compiling our annual summer reading list for thoughtful folks like you. Rhis is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor, along with my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy.

Josh Landy
So another book that’s on Ken’s and my reading this for the summer is a book called “Great Tide Rising” by Kathleen Dean Moore, who’s a philosopher at Oregon State. Kathleen, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Kathleen Dean Moore
Thanks very much. I’m glad to be here.

Ken Taylor
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about “Great Tide Rising.” And then there’s a subtitle that’s a mouthful—Great Tide Rising…

Josh Landy
Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change.”

Ken Taylor
So what’s this book about?

Kathleen Dean Moore
Well, the book weaves personal essays and philosophical ethical reflections, and it’s calling readers to stand up for the planet in this time of corporate plunder. So I have stories of Albatross, and angels and starfish and broken hearts. And those are interwoven with this pretty clear eyed, philosophical analysis of our moral obligations to the future, and to Earth abundance. My point is that we are living at this pivot point in history, and this beautiful blue marble of a planet could roll either way. So the book is really a philosopher who’s also an essayist, calling all hands on deck.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, let’s think about that a little bit. I mean, by my agency, I can do some things, right? I can recycle, I can try and reduce my carbon Pran by my agency, I can do some things. But mostly, the agency that has to operate here is kind of like a massive cooperative agency by collectivities of human beings that are nations and corporations and states. And, and it’s really hard to move those collectivities.

Kathleen Dean Moore
You are so right, the question I get most often when I’m out on the lecture circuit is, what can one person do? And my answer always stop being one person, join up with other people join in collective action join in political action, because that’s where the change has to make itself felt. And I think that this recycling effort, and even composting and all the wonderful things we can do as consumers to buy the right car, buy the right light bulbs are a distraction from the real work, which takes place, as you say, on a very, very different level. You know, when President Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords, I woke up the next morning, feeling positively energized, I felt stronger and more optimistic than I had, for a long time. I had been in this fog. And I think all of us had been in a fog for a long, long time. So many lies, so many false starts, so many people saying they were going to do something when they weren’t governments, even Obama didn’t do what he needed to have done. Even the environmental organizations couldn’t bring themselves to say the word climate change. And suddenly, that fog was lifted. And it became very, very clear what we’re up against. It’s sort of like that wonderful Cohen that says, barns burned down, now I can see the moon. So now we saw very, very clearly that the oil and gas industry was going to be essentially in charge of federal energy policy, we saw very quickly, that it was not going to be the federal government that was going to have some sort of rapid, moral enlightenment and save us all. It was going to have to be the conscience of the streets, it was going to have to be the city’s in the talents and the state level that would do it. So I was I felt energized because the clarity, in some ways, gave me some courage.

Josh Landy
Well, I take your point that now we see clearly that it’s really on us. And that the get we can’t really rely on the government. But you’re right, I want to come back to the the moral question, the philosophical question. You don’t have to convince me that we have a moral obligation here. But what would you say to somebody who was a skeptic about this and said, you know, somebody, for example, who said, Look, species come and species go, right? environments change, and some species won’t do so well, but other species will flourish? What would you say to that kind of person to motivate the moral obligation that we all have to protect the environment that we have?

Kathleen Dean Moore
You know, there’s interesting polling around that. The Yale climate change communication, people have asked people what is most convincing to them? And their answers are interesting, the most convincing argument was that we have a moral obligation to our children, to leave them a world in which they can thrive. And that it’s based on promise keeping enroll responsibility. The second most popular one was to save the life on the planet to try to not allow the destruction, mass extinction of the systems, the ecosystems, the natural systems that support all of life, including our own. And the third most popular reason was to honor our obligation to God’s creation. So if you’re asking the question in the most pragmatic way, I would, if you say what would I say to an audience, I would look at the audience and I would say, which of these reasons it is going to affect them the most.

Josh Landy
You don’t have one that you think is from a philosophical standpoint, the most compelling?

Kathleen Dean Moore
Oh, I do. I think it has to do with human rights. And I think that what we have facing us with these compounded emergencies is going to create the human rights crisis of all human rights crisis.

Ken Taylor
I am not sure I’d put it in terms of human rights. But I agree with you that there is a crisis coming. I don’t think people in their visceral heart of hearts see and feel this. It’s not like the fire coming down the ridge. Right? Or, or the terrorists coming over the horizon where you can imagine and you can feel, right, this is a huge, unequaled in the history of the human world looming thing. But how would you make people feel the looming-ness of that?

Kathleen Dean Moore
That’s a very, very good question. And, you know, I do think we have to, as philosophers know, we have to speak to the heart and to the mind. The Moral Sentiments and the rational faculty. Were very good at the rational faculty, I think, as philosophers and I would call on all of us to also think about how we are motivated by abhorrence and fear and love and imagination and hope and all these and parental parental desperate, fierce, you know, the response has been so much less than the magnitude of the problem. So I share your your frustration there.

Josh Landy
Kathleen, do you have any, anything you’re planning to read this summer that you can recommend to us?

Kathleen Dean Moore
Yes, in fact, I’m into it right now. It’s a book by Jeff Lockwood, who is a philosopher from the University of Wyoming. It’s called “Behind the Carbon Curtain.” And it is a story about the fossil fuel industry’s takeover of the University of Wyoming, and by extinction, a number of other universities, in oil rich states. It is terrifying. You know, we’re in this time of this great assault on the truth and assault on clear thinking. And I would just call on philosophers, as Jeff has answered that call the step up and defend rational ways of thinking and defend freedom of speech. are philosophers out there defending the scientist in those marches? are philosophers out there responding as kind of philosophical first responders to the lies? There are so many, so many ways in which philosophers are called to be heroes.

Ken Taylor
Alright, philosophical first responders. The first responders go into a crisis and we have a crisis of rational thought and we philosophers on the front line I love that idea.

Josh Landy
Kathleen, it’s been wonderful having you back on Philosophy Talk.

Kathleen Dean Moore
And thank you, it’s always fun to talk with you guys.

Ken Taylor
Kathleen Deam Moore from Oregon State University with her suggestions for deep summer reading. Jillian from Oakland wrote to us with a summer reading suggestion, and she’s on the line now,

Josh Landy
Jillian, welcome to Philosophy Talk. What book do you have to recommend to us for this summer?

Jillian
I am recommending “The Innocence of the Devil” by Nawal El Saadawi

Josh Landy
Great. And tell us a little bit about that. Is that is that a novel?

Jillian
It is a novel and it’s kind of a fragmented narrative uses magical realism. Some of the characters that are in the story include the devil and God, and yeah, let’s go.

Ken Taylor
Are there any non-transcendent beings?

Jillian
Yeah, no, everybody kind of moves from one place to another in pretty amazing ways. The main character is her name is ganache, which means gardens as in paradises. gardens that Garden of Eden, and she is being brought into this palace, which has been turned into an insane asylum. She’s very defiant, you know, she just doesn’t present herself in the way that is expected of her. Then there’s a few other characters that that we get to kind of follow through. There’s a head nurse and a director. And then like I said, the devil is there and God is there. And what’s curious about him is that he’s a bit of a doddering old fool. And in other ways he’s a he’s a troublemaker.

Ken Taylor
He is just the stranger on the bus trying to make his way home.

Jillian
Wait—yes, exactly.

Josh Landy
Is there a little hint of Gnosticism here that this so called God is just the Demiurge who happened? He’s not that smart. But he’s smart enough to create a world and above this being there’s the actual God somewhere.

Jillian
Ah, I think more importantly, than looking at him as a Demiurge. You’re more exploring the idea of how institutions make God what he is. One of the things to keep in mind about Sally is that she was in prison. She’s a medical doctor and a writer and a feminist. But she was jailed by Sadat. And so it’s just It’s very rooted in the idea of then kind of how you as an individual are going to stand up against the Godhead, or however you want to put that idea is, institutions may do one thing, and they may have had, you know, millennia to become what they are. And that includes, you know, and religious ideas.

Josh Landy
You know, it’s kind of a pet interest of mine the way our kind of our love affair is a culture with the devil. Was it seen? Superficially, it seems like the devil, that’s a scary figure we wouldn’t want if we had the choice who wouldn’t want to invent such a terrifying presence in their lives? On the other hand, the devil is what makes everything makes sense, right? Yeah, I mean, all this terrible stuff that happens, all this random stuff that happens, if you believe in the devil, all of a sudden, it kind of hangs together. There’s a reason for it.

Ken Taylor
Only if God’s just a demigod.

Josh Landy
Well, you know, otherwise, he’s got a lot of ‘splaining to do, Ken.

Ken Taylor
Well, right. That’s the problem of evil if you invent the devil, and if Devil is God’s creation, the devil makes things worse, right?

Jillian
No, no, I see. I think all that which is where do we go back to the creation story and we go so we go back to like, the Mesopotamian like the the anomalous, right? Where that creation story was not just here, let’s hear the story about how we’re going to figure out you know, who we are in the universe. It’s a story about the people of that time, figuring out a way to consolidate their power over their people. So you know, I’m slowly over the years have been turning into a bit of a Mesopotamian and Acadian nerd. Fantastic. And, and what’s beautiful about it to me is that, personally, I was raised in a very fundamentalist Christian Milia. And it did not make me very happy. And so it’s given me this greater, larger perspective on things and it’s actually made it so that I can kind of separate out some of the the rules that were shoved down my throat.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, Jillian, there’s something that you’re missing was you said it and Nietzsche said it and neat. Religion was not invented to make anybody happy.

Jillian
I’m gonna carry that with me.

Josh Landy
So Jillian, thanks so much for recommending innocence, the devil by the wall, Elsa Dawie. And thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you have a good one.

Ken Taylor
Let’s get another summer reading suggestion from our Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
Elihu, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Elihu
Thank you.

Josh Landy
What book do you have to recommend to us for the summer reading show?

Elihu
“The Overstory” by Richard Powers. It’s a wonderful book and I it it touches on major themes in philosophy and human human nature. And Richard Powers is a wonderful writer in any sense. But this book was particularly quite good.

Ken Taylor
What’s the background? So the—I couldn’t guess from the title.

Josh Landy
What’s the story of the overstory?

Elihu
The overstory story refers to the canopies of trees. This book has a human component but also has a component from the perspective of what it’s like to be a tree and what trees as a form of being how they perceive function and interact with the rest of the universe it but including with people, and you’ve had a number of characters, each of whom develop their relationship, either to each other in some cases, and to trees. Most of the time, from the human point of view, occasionally, it’s the human point of view, interacting with the trees. And then throughout the book, you get the the time perspective of tree, which is a very different perspective timewise than we humans have with time.

Josh Landy
Right, I think that’s one of the really interesting philosophical issues around the difference between human species being and plant species being right, this question of a different temporality, right? Right. When you think about philosophers, thinking about the world of nature, the world of plants, trees, and so sometimes you think about people like SART who find it a little disconcerting. And then sometimes you think about people like Thoreau and other romantics who thought of it as inspiring we should be like the more like the plant. Well, do you think there’s a sort of a flavor of that in this novel? Look at these trees, these trees are our communal beings. And now look at us we we don’t we lack that sense of sort of common endeavor.

Elihu
There is some of that Transcendentalism, whether it’s the RO or Emerson, there’s also a certain amount of Buddhism, where one of the characters, she’s part of what ends up happening is she has some sort of enlightenment at the end sitting under a tree in in Golden Gate Park.

Ken Taylor
Well, here’s the thing, I wonder about this kind of approach. I mean, you could think of this two ways I could think of it as an absurdist kind of thing, because you look at the human drama and it looks absurd from the point of view of a broader temporality, the striving and struggling and this and that, right? Oh, you could look at it as kind of nature worship, kind of transcend the human drama. But I wonder about the human drama in this how gripping is the human drama? Is it like a flight away from the human drama so that you say, ultimately, the drama, the drama of striving and losing and because, you know, it’s all just this circle of karma and you in the end, you get beyond it? Is this telling us get beyond the human drama or what?

Elihu
No, certainly in this book, there’s very real human dramas, human dramas of interactions between people dealing with suffering, dealing with betrayals, dealing with how do we work in relationship to corporate environment, different political forces in the United States is quite a novel. The cat named characters are very different from each other. And in the beginning, they have no relationship with each other. And then little by little their lives start having connections.

Josh Landy
They grow a canopy like a tree.

Ken Taylor
Elihu, this sounds like quite a fascinating novel, and I was gonna recommend it as something that people might want to take to the beach this summer, but I think the forest—it sounds…

Josh Landy
Take it camping. Thanks so much. This sounds like absolutely terrific novel, Richard Powers’ “The Overstory. Elihu, thanks so much for joining us.

Ken Taylor
You can find all the books we’ve talked about on the show today and more suggestions from our listeners and guests over at our community of thinkers and our website, philosophytalk.org. Now, it wouldn’t be summer without some speed reading from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… There is a new biography of Edward Lansdale, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN, by Max Boot. That would be a great summer read, I thought. Who was Edward Lansdale? A legendary spy. He started in the OSS during World War II, then the CIA. He did some highly successful anti communist work in the Philippines. He got close to the locals, listened to them, putting them in charge of their destiny, which would, of course, coincide with ours. Then sent to Indo China, he played a major role in the creation of South Vietnam. He did not get along so well with Robert McNamara and his boys when they took charge, and he was eased out. Max Boot thinks Lansdale might have been made the Viet Nam War a success if kept on. Maybe. Why was I interested? Because of Audie Murphy. When I was a boy, I saw TO HELL AND BACK, the story of his life, starring himself. One summer, I even read the book. Audie Murphy was the most decorated hero of World War II, but he couldn’t find work when he got home, no skills other than killing Nazis. But he was famous. James Cagney gave him acting lessons, then let him go, he was too much of a clodhopper. But he was cute, could ride a horse, was handy with a gun. He became a star in B movie westerns, and I surely saw them all. Huge cult following among Boomer boys. He also took a few interesting side steps. He starred in John Houston’s movie of RED BADGE OF COURAGE, and a movie called THE QUIET AMERICAN, directed and written by Joe Mankiewicz, who also did ALL ABOUT EVE. I saw it when I was ten and was quite baffled. It’s about a British guy who’s stuck in Indochina being a cynical realpolitick stick-in- the-mud, and along comes an idealistic young American government worker, Audie Murphy, who steals the grumpy British guy’s girlfriend, so the grumpy British guy frames him for selling arms to anti- communists. And he’s killed. Graham Greene, who wrote the book, hated the movie. In the book, the American did collaborate in an anti-communist terrorist act. And in the 2002 remake you may recall Brendan Fraser is also guilty. I’d read that this Quiet American was based on Lansdale. Also, the 1958 novel THE UGLY AMERICAN, a big best seller, had a character, not the title character, based on Lansdale, calling him, Edwin Hillandale. This novel was a huge hit with politicos and helped lead to the formation of the Peace Corps. In the novel, the ugly American is a good American, helping to build bridges and roads in a fictitious country. He paid attention to the locals. Ugly American means something quite different now. Marlon Brando starred in the movie adaptation, not as the ugly American, who was played by Pat Hingle, but as a misguided diplomat who learns the error of his ways too late to get us out of Viet Nam, called something else. His character was not in the book, and also not based on Lansdale. And I now know that Lansdale was not the model for Graham Greene. Greene was long gone by the time Lansdale even got to Viet Nam. But Lansdale WAS a consultant to Mankiewicz while he was making the movie. He might even have MET Audie Murphy. The most decorated hero of Word War II meets the guy that got us mired in Viet Nam. Let’s make THAT movie! Anyway, the copy of the Lansdale bio at my library was checked out. I thought about buying it, but I dunno. I already have THE QUIET AMERICAN, THE UGLY AMERICAN, TO HELL AND BACK, and NO NAME ON THE BULLET, the excellent biography of Audie Murphy. Do I need more of this mythology, fake news, movie lore, hero worship, and revisionist history? No. So I checked out GRANT instead, the new biography of US Grant by Ron Chernow, the guy who did HAMILTON, the basis for the musical, Hamilton. Big beefy book about an amazing historical figure. A thousand pages. There’s my summer reading right there. But did I learn something on the way? Did I learn, for example, that both Audie Murphy and Marlon Brando played characters based on the same real life guy? Sadly, no. There goes that irony, if that’s what it is, right out the window. Like truth itself, gone with the leaves of summer. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
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John Perry
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Debra Satz
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Karola Kreitmeier, Angela Johnston, and Collin Peden.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry.

Debra Satz
I’m Debra Satz.

Josh Landy
I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.