William James, Effective Altruism, and Sam Bankman-Fried

There is a passage in William James’ essay, The Moral Philosopher – which, by the way, is an excellent analysis of that species we now call the “pundit” or the opinion writer – which sums up the delusion called “effective altruism” and even predicts its course, from the principles it begins with:

 

“A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it, will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities. As a purely theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the best imaginable system of goods; he would indeed have an easy task; for all demands as such are prima facie respectable, and the best simply imaginary world would be one in which every demand was gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, "of n-﷓dimensions," to include all the acts and experiences incompatible with one another here below, which would then go on in conjunction﷓-such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create universes a priori, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.”

This is the set of motives that drove that EA excrescence, FTX, and its creator and monster, Sam Bankman-Fried. Frankenstein becomes his own monster, in a variant of Mary Shelley’s cautionary romance.

michael lewis agonistes

 

I have long liked Michael Lewis for one thing: the long essay he wrote after Hurricane Katrina about coming back to New Orleans. In that essay, he defended Nola from the foxification, that is, the racist demonization, that excused the inexcusable U.S. neglect of one of the world's great cities.

So, I felt I owe him one. Well, now the debt is paid. He "embeds' himself with SBF - already a vile and emptyheaded move for a reporter - and then gives us a portrait of a true privileged monster, a man who mistakes intelligence for the mastery of a few video games. A man with no ethics, no organization, and an insatiable greed. Who is his "hero". Whose innoncence, as he put it on Sixty minutes, is a thing he wants to communicate to the jury.

Michael Lewis is not, of course, the only one. The NYT coverage of SBF has leaned over backwards to tell his tale. This is a story of backstage image management that could only be explained by the fact that the parents of the involved know the media honchos who run the presses. But even with favorable NYT coverage - starting back from when they gave him a chance to "share" his story on their stage for some event after FTX fell apart - they are, reluctantly, covering the unfolding of eyewitnessed detail that pretty much sinks the image of Sam Effective Altruism Bankrobber-Fried. Lewis seems as clueless about cryptocurrency platforms as many people of his generation are about the Nigerian email scam.
Pathetic and so so typical.

The thing about that 60 minutes interview that is little commented is how bad the interviewer - Jon Wertheim - is. Whe Lewis says FTX collapsed because of a bank run situation, Wertheim should have stopped him and said FTX was not at all like a bank. A
bank is legally entitled to loan the money you deposit out. The FTX platform
was more like a safety deposit box. You are charged a fee for having the box,
but if the company actually opens the box and uses your stuff, that is called
theft. Pretty simple distinction. That Wertheim apparently knows NOTHING about
FTX makes me wonder - what is the use of television interviews? The NYT had a
story about the average age of network tv viewers now being like 65 - my age. I
think this is partly because tv viewers of a certain generation just got used
to this flatheadedness. But one of the wonderful things about social media and
cable is: this kind of bunk calls out to be de-bunked.

Who is Hamlet to him, or him to Hamlet?

The vogue for Hamlet in the 1920s is, I think, of piece with the culture of the 1920s: the wounded modernity of it all, from the Jazz age drinkers in New York city speakeasies to the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, etc. World War I showed the great and unspeakable harm of yoking together advanced technology and the senile intellection of the ruling class. The 1920s were despised, later, by people like Wyndham Lewis and reactionaries of all kinds partly due to its unstable mixture of deep mourning and sexual release.

Which was the perfect mood in which to read The Waste Land, or to compose it.

Eliot was producing a lot in the twenties, in order to supplement an income from the bank he worked at that would have been more than ample for another middle manager (500 pounds a year). But Tom and Viv pursued lifestyles that made more money a necessity. Besides, the Eliot of the time was overflowing with ideas. Which is why his essay on Hamlet, the one in which he deplored such mooks as Goethe for misunderstanding the whole failure of the thing, was, on the one hand, so outrageous, and on the other hand, was as close as his criticism came to his art. The Hamlet that he hammered at was all fragments and failure – Shakespeare’s Wasteland.

“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.3 The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most mis leading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on the play.”

What an astonishing last phrase! Eliot latter omitted this essay from some collection of his essays because it was so impertinent. Highhatting Goethe, Coleridge and Pater in one driveby is a display of sharp elbows that must have made the Edwardian sages, those still around, gasp.

The whole essay is full of other gasp-making passages. For instance, this one, on how clumsy Shakespeare bobbled his source, the (lost) Hamlet of Kyd, which was no doubt a real revenger play and no fooling around. “In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing.”

So much for those who think that the madness theme is all the more convincing for posing the question: what if a madman plays at being a madman, not realizing that he is truly mad? A question at the heart of early modern European literature – Hamlet, meet Don Quixote. This fold in the play made Hamlet a precursor of romanticism, and romanticism was something that the Eliot at this point, with his Maurrassian leanings, wanted rooted out – for reasons not unlike that of his old pal, Wyndham Lewis.

Lewis-like shock effects key passages like this one: “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.”

Sloppy Shakespeare, not able to cut and mend. Like, perhaps, Eliot in the midst of his first draft of the Wasteland? I love the “most certainly” of the artistic failure. There the teacher is, turning back the paper that little Will had worked so hard on. Alas, failure – and F!

“And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.”

Of course, the unconscious movement from dissing Pater – who thank God never wrote on Hamlet – to dissing Pater’s painting, his poem, the Mona Lisa – makes the essay all the more interesting as a good old St. Louis stomping. Behind the clerical fussiness there’s the riverside hustler. Eliot makes it clear that there are the cool people, who know what artistic success is, and the hoi polloi, who want the “interesting” – the crossword puzzle, the latest murder, Hamlet.

Eliot doesn’t mention Joyce. Lewis, who shared Eliot’s impersonality of the poet thesis at this time, would certainly have included some dig at J.J. – after all, the “character” of Hamlet figures as a major key in Ulysses. As Stephen might reply to Eliot’s irritated and irritating essay: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

It is in the Hamlet essay that Eliot lets loose upon the world (to his later dismay) the term “objective correlative.” Apparently he can’t find any in Hamlet. “The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”

It must be said that the “objective correlative” has a certain critical inevitability. Using it to beat up Hamlet, though, gives us a dramatic situation in which the critical emotion is “most certainly” in excess of the facts as they appear. Behind these facts, and this bitching, is Eliot coming into the hard realization – which he made into a worldview – that his was not a synthesizing mind, but a collaging one. Fragments were his poetry. And in his reduction of Hamlet to fragments, he gave himself a pretty good precedent.

philosophy as worry

 

Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so disinterested, so aristocratically outside the tangle of pleb emotions.

 

For these reasons, that origin story has, for the most part, been more interpreted than questioned.

 

It is, of course, hard to get clear on these things, which depend on self-reporting. Stories that one tells about oneself are, prima facie, self-interested.

 

Myself, my “philosophical” thinking has its roots more in worry than in wonder. Worry about the dark. Worry about abandonment.  Worry about money. Worry about sex. Worry about the parents, the kids, the growing old, the decline of empire, boredom, and the absence of the hosts of promised angels after you graduate from whatever it is you are graduating from.

 

Worry, of course, is socially gendered female. Worry is the knitting, it is mom, not stoic dad, wondering on the lawn.

 

Questions can be treated as innocent grammatical instruments. Science, y’all! But questions are where worry goes in language.  They are large things, the question – they have room for more than anxiety. But from my plebe view, wonder is simply the advance man of worry, the spokesmodel, worry as influencer.  

 

living in an essay: Musil

 

This is how Shaw, in the preface to Heartbreak House (1919),  summed up the ruling class in prewar  England:

“In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House of Commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went ; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.”

The war pulled back the curtains. The incredible lack of sense of the ruling class, of the industrialists, generals, journalists, academics and their like was only matched by their incredible smugness. The result of this intellectual catastrophe could be measured in the blood of the swampy battlefields of the Somme. The same story could be told of the other great powers engaged in the war: as for instance in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which underwent the horrors of the Eastern Front to defeats unimaginable at Czernowiz and the Siege of Przemyśl. Robert Musil served on the Italian front, so he was removed from where the meatgrinder of the Eastern Front,  and the newspapers, to Karl Kraus’s horror, tried to paper over the bloodshed with lies – however, the shocks of these events couldn’t be hidden. In Joseph Roth’s Radetzsky March, an officer cries out: “war is here! We’ve long expected it. Yet it surprised us.” Roth’s novel is all about the limbo into which Kakistan [Kaiser und Konig land]  army fell in its endless deployment at the edges of the empire. The officers, addicted to gambling, drink, and brothels in those border garrisons, did not form the kind of staff that would take maximum advantage in battle, or be very economical in spending the lives of their troops.

This is the background to Musil’s essayism – a sort of philosophical extension of the essay to an existentialist creed. In the Man without Qualities, which is set in the year before the outbreak of the war, the hero, Ulrich, considers the lack of any exact knowledge among the ruling class as it is amplified in the particular case of a murderer, Moosbrugger.  The trial of Moosbrugger fascinates Ulrich – just as the faits divers have fascinated intellectuals all down through the 20^th and 21^st century – for reasons he can’t quite put his finger on. It is as though this crime were symbolic of something deep in the social unconcious – but what? Is it something like what Ivan Karamazov called an “allegory” – an exemplary instance of a social malady. Here the experts called to judge Moosbrugger’s sanity make their diagnoses without either affirming or negating the question, before judges who have no knowledge of sociology or psychology, to decide the fate of a confused case of psychopathology.   The blind lead the blind lead the murderer, and at the end of the train there is the victim.
Chapter 62 – “The earth, and especially Ulrich, honor the utopia of essayism” – begins with Moosbrugger’s trial,  but leads discursively, as the topics in the Man without Qualities tend to, by a mysterious route of associations in the direction of Ulrich’s self-consciousness, and through that to the modern condition. Ulrich, when he was studying mathematics in his younger days, came upon a phrase – which, for intellectual twenty somethings, means more than just putting words together. A phrase is a discovery – as solid as a face. Ulrich’s discovery is of the phrase: to live hypothetically. That is, to take no incident in life as a conclusion, a fixed and final line in a proof, but rather to treat one’s certainties – the ego, the act, the social, the moral, the ontological, etc. – as hypotheses, conditionals waiting for proof. This young thought, Ulrich now thinks, is part of what he calls Essayismus.
There are people, we all know them, who live as though they were in a novel, or a drama. People who exist, somehow, within a certain lighting and soundtrack -to shift media. Ulrich is of the type who lives as though in an essay. “Approximately as an essay in the succession of its parts takes a thing up from many sides without grasping it whole – for a wholly grasped thing loses at once its breadth and melts into a concept – he believed it was the best way to look at and handle the whole world  and his own life.”

This puts more of an existential slant on “essayism”. I’m thinking about essayism as I read Brian Dillon’s book, Essayism, which doesn’t quite get down to the bedrock of Ulrich’s political-erotico-social position. Not that this counts against the book, which doesn’t have Musil’s ambitions – but I think it would be a nice problem to ponder – the essay’s invasion of the novel, and the sense abroad that the novel has lost its predominance – which, to me, simply means its attractiveness as a model for living your life.
I am behind the times, and made the decision, long ago, to live as though in a novel. So there is that.
 

The prophet essayist

There are essayists who, as Virigina Woolf puts it, relate their “I” to the “rheumatism in your left shoulder”; and those who relate it to “the immortality of the soul”.

Myself, I see a textual and genealogical difference between the two groups. The first are discursive, associative, and move outward to a world of doubts and quasi-comic situations. For the latter, it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living god. They are prophetic, apophantic, revelatory, assertive. In the prophetic tradition, Nineveh is always wicked, and will always pay for it in keeping with the wrath of God. We are always in the valley of bones, asking if these bones will live.

The former group are in it, ultimately, for the sport, the play, the sentiment. For every assertion there is a counter-example, and this is not to be met with some tremendous overthrow but with a certain modesty of scope. Universals will be used, but not to talk of the soul – rather, to talk of, say, the best way to roast a pig. We Nineveh-ians would do better to break down our experience see just how wicked we really have been, and whether we might be a bit more merciful than god itself about our sins.

I’m of course making a division of ideal types. I chose Nineveh to represent this wicked world because Jonah, one of the most attractive of the prophets, chose it as the object of his objection. Or rather had it chosen for him by the Lord. In the book of Jonah God, for the first time, seens to break the code of austerity of the prophet – seems in fact to tease him. As we know, teasing a prophet leads to know good – viz the children who mocked Elijah and were eaten by bears. But what of teasing on the highest level.

In the book, the prophet, after the famous big fish incident, rails against Nineveh, calling upon the city to repent to escape the wrath of God. We know how this has gone – from Sodom to Jerusalem. But in a rare exception, the Nineveh-ians do repent. They put on sackcloth and ashes. And because God is merciful and kind, he doesn’t bring down the fire this time.

This, it turns out, doesn’t satisfy the prophet. He accuses the good Lord of being a softy – too good and kind. And he asks God to take his life. He seems to feel ashamed that Nineveh was not destroyed.

“Then, said the Lord, doest thou well to be angry?” Or in the more recent versions, is it right for you to be angry? [wayyihar]. As this is the good Lord, commentators usually view this phrase as a reproach. But the tone of this reproach is, I’d maintain, a teasing one. What the Lord is getting at, like a good psychoanalyst, is the prophet’s little secret: the prophet tends to grow all too fond of his anger. Indignation and outrage are not free from the usual circuits of the libido – they become deeply satisfying automatisms. Any old codger – me for instance – can tell you that.

The essayist-prophet is a type in all Western European literatures. English has Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, to name a few – even Woolf, in her last essay, Three Guineas, tested her own prophetic instrument. I'd put, for good measure, John Berger in this group. The French have Pascal, Peguy, Bloy, and to an extent Sartre. The Germans Marx, Nietzsche, and Karl Kraus. Etc., etc.

And it is always a question with the prophet: if the word repented along the lines they have laid out, could they be satisfied? Which is why, so often, the prophet guards the anger through a nostalgia that speaks of absolute turns in history – we will never get back this innocence. Denunciation banks on the irrevocable.

Of course, Jonah’s anger does not negate Jonah’s prophecy, but it does hint at a different kind of prophetic attitude, one that turns inward, that gets behind the assertion to the doubt, and from the doubt, outward, softens the denunciation.

Commodification on the streets of Paris

 

“As I went out one morning”to quote a song, I strolled around the Marais until I came upon the Camper shoe store and “laboratory” on Rue Debelleyme, and I started to laugh.

The laugh has to be backfielded. Go back to Paris this Spring. There were constant demonstrations against our squirt of a president, and this was accompanied by much black block versus the cops action. One of the black bloc signatures was to throw bricks through the windows of luxury goods shops and banks. I once saw a Gucci store that not only put the usual plywood over the window, but actually took down the Gucci sign, trying to hide. The result of this anti-capitalist fronde was that for a while, many streets in Paris sported shops with broken store windows.

Now, Paris is the home of the art of the show window. Beginning with the consumer society of the 19^th century, this has been one of the constants, something the walker in the city looks out for. Show window design is an almost pure interface between art and commerce – it is the epitome of what Marx called Kommodifitzierung, commodification – the turning of an object or event into a marketing ploy. Interestingly, if you look back on the translation of this word into English, it really didn’t gain ground until the early 80s, when “commodification” began to show up in works of art and literary theory, and hence to newspapers. The NYT has always been my paper of record for the popularization of words and phrases – they crop up there, when they are new and dripping with yolk, captured by quote marks. So it was with “commondification”. The quotes are a way of capturing but not claiming the word. Commodification with quote marks is somehow stronger than commodification without quote marks – it is a sort of meta-commodification.

Anyway, back to my laugh. Some show window artist must have thought about the stoned windows, with the result that the Camper “laboratory”, with its function of selling shoes, is now fronted by a window in which the spiderweb imprint of the fractured window has been painted on the windows. They are fake stoned windows! This is bold, this is ironic, this is commodification and ultra irony! The irony being, in part, that Camper shoes – which I wear, normally – are definitely not luxury goods. They are wanna be luxury goods. If you want luxury sneaks, go to Balanciaga.

Commodification as an aspirational claim is one that passed over my head. But after laughing about the window, I had to admire it. It has long been the proud aim of neoliberal culture to absorb all lefty-ness in the quest to sell more goods, but usually there is some time lag and some pretence. I do not know how long it took, after Che’s death, for Che’s t shirt to arise as an accountrement for the college student, but I imagine it wasn’t an immediate process. But Campers has shown how to do it in real time.

Chapeau!