Further in a fashion to last Wednesday’s post on Quality: James Wilson on ethics, and how we might best think about them. He starts by referencing Bernard Williams‘ (and here) take on ethical inquiry– that it is about sense-making, starting from what we already care about, and always local– which led Williams to discourage scientistic models of philosophy, and to argue that philosophy should be seen as “part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities.” Wilson invokes Dewey’s pragmatism to suggest that what is required is less a shift from scientistic to humanistic conceptions of philosophy, than for philosophers working in value inquiry to better align their aspirations for theory with what it can actually deliver.
His introduction…
Philosophy is the oldest academic discipline, but where philosophy should be placed within the space of disciplines remains elusive. In the essay that inspired this special issue, Bernard Williams (2006b) is sharply critical of what he describes as scientistic approaches to philosophy, which assimilate philosophy to a model of science exemplified by physics or chemistry. In place of scientism, he offers a vision of philosophy as a humanistic discipline.
Williams says little about what it is for a discipline to be humanistic, but takes history to be a central exemplar. Humanistic inquiry is pursued, in Moore’s elucidation ‘by humans, from their unique position in the world, to make sense both of themselves and of that position’ (Moore 2017, p. 45). Humanistic inquiry focuses on forms of sense- making, and on articulating in human terms the meaning of texts, institutions, norms, events, and artefacts through interpretation, criticism and argument. In Williams’s words, viewing philosophy as a humanistic discipline is to view it ‘as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities… in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history’ (Williams 2006b, p. 197).
Not all forms of inquiry are, or should aspire to be, humanistic. Williams was sympathetic to the motivations that lead some to hope that science will be able to attain to what he described as an absolute conception of reality. It is a virtue of physics that it aspires to (and has succeeded in) providing an understanding of the world, which abstracts to a very great degree from our ‘own perspective, our peculiar and local ways of apprehending things’ (Williams 2006b, p. 185). However, he was sharply critical of the assumption that abstracting away from specifically human forms of sense-making will invariably improve our cognitive grip on ethical and political questions. As Williams argued, ‘in seeking to understand ourselves—we need concepts and explanations which are rooted in our more local practices, our culture, and our history, and these cannot be replaced by concepts which we might share with very different investigators of the world’ (Williams 2006b, p. 185).
While humanistic scholarship remains crucial for self-understanding, the longue durée has seen an apparently inexorable decline in the prestige of the humanities in relation to the sciences, and a continued narrowing in the scope of the questions that are taken to be best answered with humanistic means. The result has been a profound shift away from the humanities and towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the intellectual resources used to educate children and ready them for the workforce, and in prevailing assumptions about which disciplines bring the greatest social benefit. A sense of this long-term decline is already present in Williams’s text, and in the 25 years since then, there has been an ever-growing discourse on the decline of the humanities. The view that the humanities are in crisis has become ubiquitous even amongst their defenders.
How should philosophy position itself in this changing intellectual landscape? One obvious move is for philosophers to reframe their discipline as a science — a move that Williams disparages as ‘scientism’. Scientism, on Williams’s account goes beyond a philosopher’s ‘interest or involvement in science’, and involves a ‘misunderstanding of the relations between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences’ (Williams 2006b, p. 182). Williams is unusual in directing his concerns about scientism towards conceptions of philosophy, rather than, as is more often the case in philosophical discussions of scientism, the encroachment and/or overvaluation of science more broadly (Ridder, Peels, and Woudenberg 2018). Hence, unlike some who critique scientism, Williams does not disparage either the aims or methods of science. His goal is limited to providing a principled account of why questions relating to human self-understanding are not best interpreted as questions that can be answered using scientific means.
Williams presents two main objections to scientism in philosophy. First, philosophical writing needs to be reflective, and that reflection requires styles of writing in which the reader’s sense of what is important is engaged, rather than ignored or kept at a distance. Second, philosophy (or at least those parts of philosophy Williams is most interested in) is about sense-making. Sense-making is to a significant degree interpretive, historically situated and local. For both reasons, importing scientific methods, or assumptions that philosophers should adhere more closely to scientific methods, ends up obscuring or misinterpreting philosophy as an activity, rather than shedding light on it.
Williams’s wide-ranging essay takes for granted the intellectual landscape of the end of the twentieth century, and makes some deep and provocative claims about what philosophy is and how it should be done. My response starts from the somewhat changed intellectual landscape of the mid-2020s, is similarly wide-ranging, and also aims to say something novel and provocative about how philosophy should be done. I engage closely with what Williams says, but with the aim of thinking about what philosophy now should be, rather than providing an interpretation that takes up every strand of Williams’s argument or is definitive even in the interpretation of those elements I do discuss.
I am sympathetic to Williams’s reasons for reasserting the importance of the humanistic in philosophy, but will question some of the assumptions about disciplinarity that seem to shape his argument. In particular, I argue that it is a mistake to think that there is an overall answer to the question whether philosophy belongs with the humanities or the sciences. Rather, the philosophical methods that it is most fruitful to adopt depend on the research question to be addressed (a point that Williams’s own philosophical practice showcases, even if his metaphilosophy makes this less clear).
Williams’s objections to scientism are most persuasive in cases where the domain to be investigated is, at least to a significant degree, constituted by and through human self-understandings. Williams, of course, thought that value inquiry — whether in ethics or political philosophy — is such a domain. However, this is a point on which Williams and his moral realist critics sharply disagree, with both sides at times thinking the other’s position not only wrong, but hopelessly confused and obscure.
Williams’s views about the nature of ethics both support, and are supported by his broader humanistic conception of philosophy, while other philosophers’ views of ethics as being akin to science (or to mathematics) both support and are supported by their distinctive conceptions of philosophy. This might lead to the worry that there is something question-begging about Williams’ argument. I shall suggest that appearances may be deceptive: to the extent that there are deep-seated and apparently intractable disagreements about the ontology and epistemology of ethical values, this is evidence in favour of Williams’s view rather than his moral realist opponents. I argue that it is helpful to view such disagreements through the lens of a transdisciplinary epistemology, in which incompatible methodologies and ontologies, and how to reconcile them, are central themes.
Looked at from this perspective, philosophy is an outlier: no other discipline suffers such a mismatch between the level of confidence of its competent practitioners that there are correct and highly general answers to its research questions, and the power of the methods adopted within the discipline to resolve disagreements between these same competent practitioners. Philosophers working in value inquiry would do better to be more honest about philosophy’s limits and more modest in what they expect it to do. Looked at in this way, it is Williams’s humanistic view of ethics that better comports with the totality of the evidence. I close by reconsidering the role of cases and thought experiments in ethics, and arguing that a suitably refined version of Williams’s position in ethics has much in common with Dewey’s pragmatism…
As we think about thinking, we might spare a thought for Dōgen; he died on this date in 1253. A Buddhist monk, writer, poet, and philosopher, he was the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. Dōgen is known for his extensive writings like the Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, considered his magnum opus), the Eihei Kōroku (Extensive Record, a collection of his talks), the Eihei Shingi (the first Japanese Zen monastic code), along and his Japanese poetry, and commentaries.
Relevantly to the piece above, Dōgen’s perspective of virtue is discussed in the Shōbōgenzō as something to be practiced inwardly so that it will manifest itself on the outside– i.e., virtue is something that is both internal and external in the sense that one can practice internal good dispositions and also the expression of these good dispositions.
Dōgen watching the moon. Hōkyō-ji monastery, Fukui prefecture, circa 1250 (source)
We keep marveling at how fast the years go by. The deeper problem, Mike Mariani argues, is that we’re forgetting them — and losing the quiet, boring moments where memory forms…
We’ve long been ensorcelled by the passage of time. Puckered leaves fluttering from the spidery arms of barren trees. Grains of sand tumbling through the delicate neck of an hourglass. A curved cornice perched over a snow-covered mountain, awaiting an avalanche to bring it down. These evocative emblems of seasons, hours, and the vicissitudes they leave in their wake speak to the bittersweet relationship we’ve cultivated with this unit of measurement.
Whether in Proustian reveries, digital photo libraries, or the watchful doppelgänger that gazes out at us each morning, ever-so-slightly altered, we’re inclined to a tender wistfulness toward time — the persistent awareness that, however fast or slow, it’s forever slipping through our fingers.
But lately, our relationship to the months, years and decades that landscape our lives has shifted in some unsettling ways. Instead of regarding the passage of time with introspection or melancholy, many of us now observe it with a mounting sense of alarm.
You don’t have to look very far to find ample evidence that we are experiencing a metaphysical crack-up around time. There’s a growing conviction among people from all walks of life that time is moving faster than it did several decades ago — or even prior to the Covid pandemic. While this belief crept into the zeitgeist like a sly, slinking fog, the refrains are now so pervasive that they’ve started to supplant idle chatter on the weather. Our focus has shifted from rejoicing in cloudless days or grousing over gloomy skies to fixating on the dizzying speed at which our lives are hurtling by.
This is particularly evident on sites like Reddit, where users now regularly commiserate over how rapidly the years are passing. A farmer whose work cycles alongside the seasons “can’t believe how fast this year has gone.” A middle school teacher recounts how she finds herself “having these conversations with students … who are perturbed by the speed of life.” Perhaps most tellingly, for a programmer, the “pandemic years blurred together, and everything after feels compressed, like one long season instead of separate years.” Civilizational events, including not only Covid but also climate change, large-scale armed conflict and the rise of AI “have piled up so quickly that it feels like we’re living through multiple decades at once.”
In recent years, these stray observations have coalesced into a chorus. Everyone from Boomers to Zoomers is mystified at how the passage of time has sped up, and feels disoriented by the strange velocity that’s colored how we’re living through the 2020s. But to hear these stifled laments is also to observe the absurdity of contemporary American life: While so many of us agree that our relationship to time has been warped, our collective response has been to shake it off and move on. It’s as though we all started losing our depth perception at the same time — crashing into road medians, pratfalling down staircases — and instead of resolving to rectify the predicament, we’ve simply resigned ourselves to daily collisions and collapses.
In some ways, the scale of this phenomenon resembles an episode of mass cognitive dissonance, or even a population-level folie à deux. It’s worth asking if something about our internal mechanisms for gauging the passage of time has changed — or been irrevocably thrown out of sync with human timekeeping and the atomic clocks we’ve structured civilization around for nearly a century. Or, alternatively, perhaps the pandemic spoiled our capacity to judge duration, expanding and contracting our sense of time over and over until the fabric grew loose and rippled, an undifferentiated mass of fibers stretched into a form we no longer recognize…
[Mariani considers the thinking of scientists and philosophers who’ve grappled with this issue since the 19th century, considers “the internal clock fallacy,” and explores the impact of modern technology (“Browsing, scrolling and swiping are more likely to quiet or even anesthetize our brains than activate them in the ways required to form memories…”). He concludes with a “defense” of boredom…]
The stakes of this phenomenon can sometimes seem low. Feeling like time is speeding up is not a “kitchen table issue”; it won’t raise your taxes or make you go hungry. But the TIMED project has demonstrated that people who feel like they’re losing time are genuinely unhappy and even distressed about it. Members of Gen Z, in particular, don’t talk about the quickening pace of their lives with disinterested curiosity or frivolous bemusement — they lament it. When we lose our grip on the passage of time, it can feel like we’re also losing grip on our own lives.
Western culture views time as a currency to be leveraged, channeled and optimized. The societal pressure to perform productivity at all times is so insistent and thrumming that many of us — myself included — have lost the ability to slow down and luxuriate in the inherent slowness of time, the way it oozes forward like honey slithering across a glass jar. When Aldous Huxley was asked about time by an interlocutor in “The Doors of Perception,” his reply was both simple and profound. “There seems to be plenty of it,” he said. Untethered from his ego and all the worldly attachments it clung to, Huxley was able to tap into the spaciousness of existence — an amplitude and abundance that’s permanent and inviolable, if only we still had the freedom to see it.
It’s true that technology has capitalized on this culture of synchronized compliance. The companies that manufacture our devices and make the programs that run on them have wedged themselves into this perverse relationship to productivity, offering the badges and motifs that signify a certain enterprising competence. As Jenny Odell points out in her book, “How to Do Nothing,” there’s a battle playing out “for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” Through these products, we personify the ideals of practicality and industriousness.
The pandemic, too, eventually fed into the hungry zeitgeist of maximizing our output and sacrificing ourselves on the altar of “getting ahead.” The increased use of communications platforms like Slack, Teams and Zoom promoted a porousness between our work and home lives, allowing what Odell calls a “certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought” to infiltrate spaces long insulated from them.
This explains why many people feel that the way they experienced time during the pandemic never snapped back to how they processed it before Covid. In the aftermath, we became even more tethered to these platforms and other virtual spaces where productivity lingers at a low, insistent hum 24 hours a day. With our minds more anxious and overstimulated, our perception of time never had the chance to return to an earlier, more composed pace.
Further, trends that predated Covid resurfaced as though shot out of a cannon, and the ambient pressure to advance our lots at all costs imbued our culture with a mercenary quality. We were all racing to make more money, afford a home, secure a job, #YOLO at the live events we were unceremoniously robbed of. Amid this competitive turbulence — and the technologies that capitalized on our unease about it — everything started to move faster.
If we accept this premise, then maybe the crisis of time speeding up is not as hopelessly irreversible as it often seems. According to the latest time perception research, the amount of information our brains engage with shapes our subjective sense of how fast time is moving. If we intentionally reduce the stimuli we’re exposing ourselves to in a given day or week, then our brains will gradually slow down. And if our brains slow down, then our perception of time will taper off, too.
For their part, Ogden and other TIMED researchers feel that society has imposed too much responsibility on the individual to limit their use of technology. “Maybe it’s time that we shifted some of that onto the creators,” Ogden said. “The key metric for the success of digital technology is how long users are on it for, and how many people they can get on it for as long as possible. How do we flip that?” While we wait for those larger systemic changes, though, Ogden emphasized the importance of using our devices in a more intentional fashion. “What are you trying to get out of this digital technology use?” she asked. “You need to have an awareness of your own goals.”
In addition to modifying our own individual behavior, however, we also need to change the culture surrounding how we spend our time. That means coming to terms with the reality that boredom and “doing nothing” are neither shameful nor necessary evils. “There is huge value in doing nothing,” Ogden said. “We need to move away from thinking that it’s weird, lazy or slovenly.” Asked how she would spend a perfect holiday, Ogden described something very close to what people now labor so strenuously to avoid. “It would be to go and sit in a square in Italy with a nice glass of wine and watch the world go by.”
In his “Principles of Psychology,” William James invites us to participate in an experiment. “Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed,” he writes. The length of that single minute, he explains, will feel overwhelming. “You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course.” Those 60 seconds feel so full, James goes on, because “you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se.” When our senses are engaged and stimulated, time is compressed, disguised, eclipsed. “The feeling of bare time,” however, “is the least stimulating experience we can have.”
We used to tolerate those interminable minutes standing in a crowded grocery line, gazing out the convex glass window of an airplane, waiting for the dull red digits on an oven timer to run down to zero. These are now the endangered species of our day-to-day lives. And they are far more valuable than we ever could have known…
As we think about time, we might spare a thought for Richard Trentlage; he died on this date in 2016. A jingle writer, he wrote jingles for dozens of clients, including McDonald’s, the National Safety Council, and V8. But he is surely best remembered for penning the Oscar Mayer jingle:
“Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener / That is what I’d truly like to be / ’Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener / Everyone would be in love with me”
Paolo Veronese, The Adoration of the Magi, 1571 (source)
Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W. Laqueur explores the work of an artist whose love of dogs landed him in hot water with the Inquisition (and here)…
The art historian Kenneth Clark thought that Veronese was “the greatest dog lover of the Renaissance”. We have absolutely no biographical evidence to support this claim but we do have the evidence of numbers: there are a great many dogs in Veronese’s paintings. And Clark could have gotten support of a different kind from the great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin. For Ruskin, Veronese’s dogs had a distinctive moral and social quality, which was especially prominent in one particular painting: Cupid with Two Dogs, a “great heroic poem”. Here, he wrote, two dogs are represented with the “highest, or spiritual view” of their nature: two magnificent mastiffs, “wildest of beasts perhaps they would have been by nature”. Between them is a beautiful boy, “golden quivered” — who represents, Ruskin thought, human love — holding the great beasts by a chain in his hands.
Paolo Veronese, Cupid with Two Dogs, 1580, a “great heroic poem” (source)
Love conquers savagery is how Ruskin interpreted the painting. But perhaps Cupid serves less as a stand-in for love (and its unpredictable nature) and more as a caretaker for these spectacular dogs, known for their steadfastness, who speak to a different kind of amorous union: one as faithful as dogs are to humans. The animals’ allegorical meaning, whatever it is, seems to me less important than the sweet intimacy with which the dogs are painted, grounded in their gaze and their sheer benign weightiness. The one on the right looks quizzically and seductively out at us; the other, the more relaxed one on the left, looks with Cupid toward the painter outside the frame. Perhaps contemporary viewers would have seen them as having been once the “wildest of beasts” but they seem very far from that now.
Visually they are the stars of the show in their almost psychedelically painted black-on-white spotted fur, their red tongues and glistening eyes like points of light. The curves of their backs frame the bathed, soft flesh of the Cupid figure; the leg of the dog on the left is intertwined with his leg — he is astride of it — and touches the left paw of the other dog. All this in a severely constrained space, a vignette, that stands at one end of a scale, with Veronese’s great theatrical scenes (and their dogs) at the other. This is a formally virtuosic painting, whatever else it is about or means, about dogs, doggishness, and the gaze. It would be a surprise, given his careful attention, if Veronese did not in fact love dogs…
[Laqueur considers other s of Veronese’s dogs…]
… We in fact have almost no documentary evidence why any painter, and Veronese in particular, was interested in thinking with dogs. But we do in his case have a tantalizing small hint because on July 18, 1573, he was called before the Inquisition to answer questions about one of his paintings, specifically about a dog that figures prominently, front and centre.
The Inquisitor asked if he had any idea why he had been summoned. Veronese replied that he did not although he speculated it might have been because the Inquisitors had summoned the Prior of San Giovani e Paulo who had commissioned a “Last Supper” from him as a replacement for a Titian on the same subject and “ordered him to have painted [in the picture] a Magdalen in place of a dog”. It had been more than three months since the painting had been finished; the dog was still there; no penitent prostitute had been added. Veronese confessed, that he had not done what they had ordered the Prior to order him to do. He told the Inquisitor that he would gladly do “everything necessary for my honour and for that of my painting”, but that he did “not understand how a figure of Magdalen would be suitable there.”
He had every reason not to understand. It is generally accepted that the painting in question was intended to be, as requested by the monastery, a Last Supper; we can identify it from all the detailed questions the Inquisitors asked and from its subsequent history. He might himself have caused some confusion by saying the painting was of the “Last Supper that Jesus Christ took with His Apostles in the House of Simon” when the Inquisitor asked what picture he was speaking about, although the Last Supper was neither at the house of Simon the Pharisee where the Magdalen story took place (Luke 7:36–50) nor of Simon the Leper (Mark 14:3–9) and Matthew 26:6–13) where Mary anointed Jesus. Veronese made no pretence in any of his feast scenes or other religious painting of faithfully illustrating a text. He was not unusual in this regard.
This was also not a Galileo moment: dogs in religious paintings did not threaten the teachings of the Church; there are plenty of them in paintings of The Last Supper. And they would be particularly appropriate in a commission from a Dominican monastery because of their well-known association with the order’s founder, St Dominic de Guzman. A black dog had announced to the saint’s mother “that she would bear in her womb a dog who, with a burning torch in his mouth and leaping from her womb, seemed to set the whole earth on fire”.6 She named her son after St Dominic of Silo, who had interceded on her behalf when she had failed to conceive. A dog with a torch in its mouth had already become in the late Middle Ages an iconographical sign for her son, the saint, in painting and sculpture for the order named after him and a logo until this day also for parishes named after the order’s founder. Everyone would know this. And, either in response to this story or independently much was made already in the Middle Ages of how the name of the order in Latin — Dominicanus — could easily be repurposed as Domini canis (“Dogs of the Lord”): dogs as the doppelgängers of the monks themselves, scurrying around corralling souls as in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s 1365 fresco Allegory of the Active and Triumphant Church.
But the problem was not, as Veronese first guessed, the presence of a dog instead of a Magdalen. In fact, he was not summoned in front of the Venetian Inquisition for heresy or even dubious iconography, although that charge was the ostensible subject of his trial. Veronese was collateral damage of local ecclesiastical politics, caught up in a struggle between Rome and Venice. The Inquisitor needed to prove himself to a new papal nuncio. In the context of the Counter-Reformation this painting could be construed as suspicious because of its indisputable theatrical extravagance; the Council of Trent had charged bishops with making sure that religious paintings were appropriately decorous and true to text.
Veronese’s only defence against this sort of attack — in addition to trying to claim he was no worse than Michelangelo in allowing his imagination full play — was a version of art for art’s sake: “We painters take the same licence the poets and the jesters take”. He filled the vast space of the canvas appropriately as his imagination dictated: his job was “to create the painting as I thought fit, it was large and could accommodate numerous figures”: “figures as ornaments, of my own invention”. The Inquisitor would have none of this. Everything in appropriate religious art, he was told, everything “befits the spiritual — there are no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, or any such silliness [as in yours]”. Veronese was ordered to “correct the painting” within three months.
In fact, all he did was put in a label where before there had been none. It read in the Latin of the Vulgate “Et fecit ei convivium magnum Levi in domo sua” (“Levi made the Lord a Great Feast”, Luke 5:29). A new name transformed Veronese’s Last Supper, in which soldiers and dogs and jesters might be regarded as sacrilegious and disrespectful, into a painting of a relatively obscure dinner with tax collectors and a great company of publicans at a rich man’s house to which Jesus had been invited. The Feast in the House of Levi, as the painting was now called, remained in the refectory of the priory for which it had been painted, watching over the monks as they ate, until it was moved to the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice in the nineteenth century.
Veronese, The Feast in the House of Levi (detail), 1573 (source)
* Martin Luther (speaking of his dog Tölpel [German for “klutz”]) in “Table Talk No. 2803” (1531), in Tischreden, vol. 3 (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1914) (author’s translation)
Quite a feet: Ig Nobel Prize winners took home this statuette, which was designed to celebrate the 2026 ceremony theme, fungi
It’s that time of year again: earlier this month, the Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded…
Scientists who studied cockroach milk proteins, splash-free urinals, and buried underpants garnered top honors at the 36th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony on Thursday, Sept. 3. The humorous honors, which are given “for achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK,” were awarded in Zurich for the first time, after 35 years of ceremonies in the US. The Ig Nobel’s organizers at the magazine Annals of Improbable Research moved the ceremony because of safety concerns for international winners and journalists traveling to the US, according to Marc Abrahams, Ig Nobel founder and the master of ceremonies…
… The Ig Nobel in Biomechanics went to the University of Oxford’s Matilda Brindle and coworkers, who have redefined kissing as “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer” after observing the behavior in ants, birds, polar bears, and primates (Evol. Hum. Behav. 2025, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106788).
The discovery that milk proteins from viviparous cockroaches—insects that nourish their developing offspring within their bodies instead of in an external egg case—possess three times as much energy as cow milk proteins garnered the coveted Chemistry Prize. A team led by Leonard M. G. Chavas at Dectris Japan and Subramanian Ramaswamy at Purdue University studied the proteins from living Diploptera punctata cockroaches (IUCrJ 2016, DOI: 10.1107/S2052252516008903).
For their study “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff at the University of California, Irvine, and coworkers took home the Economics Ig Nobel. Among other things, they learned that drivers of expensive, late-model cars were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2012, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1118373109)...
As we extol the eccentric, we might spare a thought for Orville Redenbacher; he died on this date in 1995. An agronomist and businessman, he was described by The New York Times as “the agricultural visionary who all but single-handedly revolutionized the American popcorn industry.” Redenbacher’s interest in popcorn blossomed early. It was the favorite snack on his family’s farm, and he grew it (and sold it from the back of his car) to earn extra spending money.
After graduating from Purdue, Redenbacher returned to agriculture, serving as a Farm Bureauextension agent, then working in fertilizer sales. In 1951, Redenbacher and partner Charles F. Bowman bought the George F. Chester and Son seed corn plant in Boone Grove, Indiana. Naming their company “Chester Hybrids,” they tried tens of thousands of hybrid strains of popcorn before settling on a hybrid they named “RedBow.” Over the next two decades, Chester became a worldwide supplier of popcorn seed while also selling its own varieties directly to consumers at its plant in Valparaiso, Indiana.
In 1970, the company introduced a new gourmet hybrid popping corn (developed by plant breeder Carl Hartman) and began distributing it to retail outlets. On the advice of an advertising agency, the product was branded under Orville Redenbacher’s name, and launched as Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn (in 30-ounce jars)– with the tagline “World’s most expensive popping corn.”
While Orville Redenbacher-branded popcorn is still available, it is (a la last Wednesday’s post) no longer Orville’s passion product. In 1976, Redenbacher sold the company to Hunt-Wesson Foods, a division of Norton Simon, Inc. In 1983, Esmark purchased Norton Simon, which in turn was acquired by Beatrice Foods in 1984. In 1985 Kohlberg Kravis Robert acquired Beatrice with the goal of selling off businesses. In 1990, they sold the popcorn business and other old Hunt-Wesson businesses to agribusiness giant ConAgra.
Mardean Isaac, in The Republic of Letters, on chess and what it can– and can’t– teach us. He begins by recounting his personal history with the Royal Game, culminating in an intense period of play…
… Soon after I started my spree, I could already feel subtle cognitive re-wiring beginning to take place. The shape of those changes seemed to align with the objective lessons chess imparts; as if contemplating the findings on a psychedelic drug trip, the issue then becomes whether this is really the case.
People read themselves into interpretations of the greater significance of the game. For Vladimir Nabokov, like the sentence, chess reaches its most elevated form in the perfect rendering of problems into compositions. Stanley Kubrick, who used to put in 12 hour days playing in Washington Square Park, had a stab at life lesson stuff in an old Playboy interview: “Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you’re in trouble.” A 1966 profile of the director in the New Yorker reveals the grubbier material underneath that prudence. At the end of the piece, Kubrick sees the reporter eyeing what he perceives as a killer move, and breaks out in agony to encourage him to make it. But it turned out to be a trap; the move opened a pathway for Kubrick to win. The game’s laws are objective, and can be understood by analysing the outcomes of actions and potential actions. But while players are necessarily guided by explicit rules, they often gain their edge from covert ones. The edge-seeking on display there, rooted in an absence of institutional cushioning, would never leave Kubrick, as he strove to reach the apex of the most logistically burdensome and patronage dependent of art forms.
Chess is primarily a strategic, not a cultural, phenomenon. That is the key to its longevity: where culture changes and evolves, strategy survives and persists—merely as itself. Chess reveals the chiselled edges of strategic veracity: the failures that ensue from not registering your adversary; the complacency that sets in when seemingly comfortably in control; not recognising that risk is a constant, meaning that a good move, coming at the expense of a great one, can also harm you.
The logic of chess exists outside of us; and yet every move feels so personal. Is there an illustration of personal limits more acutely painful than making a truly dumb move, or not spotting a killer one? Not seeing things objectively is not only a guarantor of psychic torment—it often also leads to a kind of self-defeat anyway, because it shuts off routes to our own self-advancement, even if the solipsistic voice in your head might tell us otherwise.
This is where zugzwang (“move compulsion” in German) comes in. This strategic concept refers to a situation in which you have no choice but to make a move that will worsen your position. For example: you are in check, and have to protect your king by moving over a piece that will certainly be taken, reducing your pool of available pieces to the point where victory is made more difficult or impossible. (The only way out of zugzwang—resignation—is no way out at all: a fact which carries a dark metaphorical valence.) It seems to reach into the ultimate dynamic: biology set against time. The problem is: the onus is always on you—you who are always either preparing, or executing, the move you must make. The issue of needing to make a move; there being no such thing as stasis; and each one either advancing or worsening, is a kind of approximation of our biological existence. It’s a reminder that everything is advancing or hurting your cause. Whether or not you are creating the conditions for zugzwang boils down to the accumulated consequences of your own actions. It affirms that you are always responsible for advancing yourself—even, and especially, into oblivion. Worst of all, it affirms that you were responsible for creating the objective conditions that brought about your own drive towards defeat.
I can’t hang onto this moment any longer. It is up to me to decide whether I’ve played too many games for that, or too few. I can either accept that I now have to drive on into the endless forest of chess—or step back altogether, leaving this essay as the only footprint of my ramble across its periphery. As I contemplate the problems with either position, I realise I have already entered my own personal zugzwang…
Perhaps we’d do well to sort the “games” we play into those like chess worth playing, win or lose, and those that are not… Of those latter– especially of those the present themselves not so much as games, but as “the way things are”– as “Joshua / WOPR,” the computer in War Games, observes to “David Lightman” (Matthew Broderick) after thermonuclear annihilation is narrowly avoided: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
As we make a move, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Addams Family premiered on ABC. Based on a series of single-paneled cartoons by cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker magazine that began in 1938, the series took the unnamed characters in the single-panel gag cartoons and gave them names, backstories, and a household setting. The main cast was: Gomez (John Astin), Morticia (Carolyn Jones), Lurch (Ted Cassidy), Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax), and Wednesday (Lisa Loring).
The show went off the air in 1966, but The Addams Family’s popularity never really died. Since that time, Hanna-Barbera created two different cartoon series based on the show, three feature films were released in 1991, 1993, and 1998 plus a direct-to-video movie in 1998. In 2019, MGM released a brand new full-length animated film which was pretty good followed by a sequel two years later which wasn’t. In 2022, Jenna Ortega starred in a Netflix show centering on the character of Wednesday Addams, but all of the Addams have supporting roles for the series Wednesday including Luis Guzman (Gomez), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Morticia) and Isaac Ordonez (Pugsley).
You must be logged in to post a comment.