Some new Watchmen footage (well, partly new) is online. (Conical hat tip to AICN.) And it continues to look good; I just hope the State lets us watch it.
In the meantime, check out Alan Moore’s comments on the political subtext. (Though I have to take issue with Moore’s claim that no one before him had tried that kind of approach to the superhero mythos; surely Squadron Supreme and Dark Knight Returns, to name no others, can claim precedence.)
Anarchy is and always has been a romance. It is clearly the best way, and the only morally sensible way, to run the world – that everybody should be the master of their own destiny, everybody should be their own leader. This is something that I still believe; I think that even a cursory look around the world at the moment – particularly at the moment – would reveal that it is about .000001 percent of the world’s population that causes 99.99999 percent of the world’s problems. And that tiny percentage – it’s not the Jewish banking conspiracy, it’s not the asylum-seekers, it’s not the secret homosexual conspiracy running Hollywood, it’s not even the Scientologists: it is leaders. That what we need is an administration at most; we don’t need people to boss us about.
– Alan Moore
My sixth AOTP post is up: Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis. I start out with the Austrian theory of the business cycle and end up with anarchy. 🙂
1. On my first trip to FEE it was frustrating to fly into NYC and then be able to spend no time there, so on my second trip, two weeks ago, I made sure to stay overnight in NYC so I’d have at least a few hours. I had dinner at the Evergreen restaurant (10 E. 38th), but it seems to have declined since I was there a year ago (their Amazing Crispy Duck was truly amazing last time, but merely good this time.) I was pleased to see a copy of my book Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand on the shelf at a Barnes & Noble, especially since it’s been on back order at the Atlas Objectivist Studies Institute Center Society for, like, ever.
The next morning I checked out of my hotel and headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (after first leaving my bags at a handy luggage storage service, since the Met doesn’t store large bags). This was my first visit to the museum, and I was pressed for time and had to do an unsatisfactory mad dash through the collections, but it was still terrific. Then after a nice Turkish lunch at Akdeniz (19 W. 46th) I took the train up to FEE, where I had a good time and commented on some interesting junior faculty papers. It was nice to see, inter alia, Pete Boettke and Dan D’Amico.
2. There isn’t too much to report from my APS trip last week that I haven’t already mentioned, but I can say that the Orange Beach/Gulf Shores area finally seems to be entirely recovered from its battering four years ago. I hung out with Kelly and his family, and with two of our majors Andy and Rob (who turn out to be fellow fans of Coupling, a show much better and funnier than its Wikipedia entry might suggest).
3. As previously mentioned, this past weekend I was in Boston for a Liberty Fund conference on Lysander Spooner (in honour of his bicentenary), where I also saw my old comrades Eric Mack (with whom I visited Quincy Market for a quick lunch), Randy Barnett, Aeon Skoble, and David Hart. The seemingly endless construction down by the wharf (which was underway when I was living there in the early 80s, and was still underway, with virtually no progress visible, during my last visit a few years ago) now seems to be finally mostly over.
On Thursday we watched the Palin-Biden debate in the hospitality suite; I was somewhat disappointed that neither one embarrassed him/herself too badly. Palin even got in one good line; when the moderator mentioned that Palin had said she didn’t know what the vice-president did, while Biden had said that he would not accept the vice-presidency, Palin told Biden: “In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke; and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it.” And Biden made an inadvertently funny remark when he sounded as though he were saying that a Biden presidency itself (rather than simply its resulting from Obama’s death in office) would be “a national tragedy of historic proportions.” Otherwise the debate was soul-destroyingly boring – which, given the two candidates’s reputations as loose cannons, was probably the best that their handlers could hope for.
On Friday I took the T up to Harvard. The last time I went by my freshman dorm there was an American flag up in my window (ack!); happily gone now. Alas, some of my favourite Harvard-area bookstores are gone too, though others remain.
Good news for Austrians: while even in better bookstores one finds, as a rule, one or two books at most by Hayek, and none by Mises, the economics section of the Harvard Coop had eight separate titles from each.
On Saturday we first drove past Spooner’s house at 109 Myrtle Street, and then headed out to Forest Hills Cemetery, where we saw not only Spooner’s gravesite (with a monument added by Randy Barnett) but also those of his fellow abolitionist/anarchists William Lloyd Garrison and Colonel William B. Greene (not, as Aeon reminds me, to be confused with that other Colonel Green).
Speaking whichly, at the conference I met film producer Sky Conway, with whom I’d previously communicated only by email; he gave me a copy of his low-budget, libertarian-oriented independent Star Trek film Of Gods and Men, which stars a number of characters from the show (played by the original cast members), including Uhura, Chekov, and Tuvok. I’ll report on it as soon as I get a chance to watch it; in the meantime, check out the trailer.
4. In other news, my fifth AOTP post went up on Friday: History of an Idea; or, How An Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Socialism Became An Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Capitalism.
Tomorrow morning I’m off to Boston for a Liberty Fund conference on Lysander Spooner, organised by Randy Barnett. We’re reading extensive selections from Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, The Unconstitutionality of the Laws Prohibiting Private Mails, No Treason, Natural Law, and Letter to Grover Cleveland. Among the secondary sources included in the readings packet I was pleased to see both my own Spooner article and the reply from Randy to J. H. Huebert that I originally solicited for the JLS.
In other news, when McCain first chose Palin as his running mate, I described the pick as “fiendishly brilliant.”
I take it back.
Greetings from Orange Beach! I got in tonight at 9:30, a bit later than I’d intended, but thereon hangs a tale.
I gave a midterm in class today, and I’d planned to leave right after. But while I was invigilating (as the British say) the midterm, I was reading Michael Thompson’s new book Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (a great book, though with a lousy cover – Brownian motion is not a good visual metaphor for Thompson’s conception of life and action), and I came across a passage that gave me an idea for some remarks to add to my Spooner paper.
Thing is, I’m giving a version of the Spooner paper as my presidential address at the APS this weekend (my second presidential address here; check out the first one, from 2002), and I wanted to include my latest thoughts. So I paused to ponder, write, and print; hence my tardy departure for the Gulf. Anyway, here’s the new material:
In his recent book Life and Action, Michael Thompson considers an example from Rawls involving a society whose practice of promising differs from our own in various ways we would regard as unreasonable – regarding promises as binding even in emergency situations, for example, or even when made while talking in one’s sleep. If one holds, as Rawls does, that such a society simply does not have our institution of promising, but has a different, unreasonable one instead, and if one further holds that the binding force of promises depends on the reasonableness of the institution of promising, it would seem to follow, Thompson points out, that none of the promises made in that society should be regarded as binding, even the ones that our own institution would approve. (Analogously, if one holds that the duty not to steal depends on the reasonableness of the institution of property, it would seem to follow that in any society whose property institutions have any unreasonable features, such as slavery, their institution of property is unjust overall, and so no act of theft in that society warrants condemnation.)
Finding such implications counterintuitive, Thompson suggests that we keep the claim that the normative status of individual instances depends on the reasonableness of the practice as a whole, but abandon the claim that the deviant cases are genuinely part of the practice:
No one will hold that just any series of actions … can exhibit the sort of unity we intend in bringing things under a single practical disposition. And there is no reason to imagine that just any general schedule of action might be employed to describe such a thing, or, equivalently, that to any subtle diversity of such schedules there must correspond a possible diversity of dispositions. … Suppose, for example, that I return a deposit someone has made to me, a book for example, thinking “It is his: I must give it back” … and that I have often done this sort of thing. Later, though, I return some autumn leaves that have blown from someone’s red maple onto my lawn, again thinking “They are hers; I must give them back.” Need we hold that the practical disposition manifested in my earlier acts must or could have shown up in an act of leaf-return? Need we hold that the disposition that was manifested in those sensible earlier acts is any different from that displayed in the like acts of a more reasonable person who would have let the leaves go? That returning the book and ‘returning’ the leaves struck me as ‘the same’, that I didn’t feel any difference, cannot be supposed to establish the identity. The disposition that operates in my intuitively reasonable acts of return, we might think, is no different from the one that operates in all the acts of return of a person who lets leaves blow by; something else is at work in me in cases where I busy myself returning them. (Michael Thompson, Life and Action (Harvard 2008), p. 190.)
On this reading, the “inner constitution of the practice” (say, of promising) is the same in our society and in societies that count promises as binding when made in sleep and so on; it’s just that this inner constitution “is associated, in the deviant communities, with a widespread error or a superstitious religious conviction or something on the order of a fad – disturbance, at all events, and mere dross ….” (p. 186) I suggest that for Spooner, the legal institutions of nonlibertarian societies likewise have the same libertarian “inner constitution” as those of libertarian societies, while their nonlibertarian practices are alien accretions – so that when a judge in the deviant society condemns a murderer and commands the return of an escaped slave, she is in the first case, but not the second, expressing the same practice as her libertarian counterpart – and so in the first case is applying law while in the second case she is applying something that stands to law as fool’s gold stands to gold.