"Against Democracy" by Jason Brennan (2016)

Except for one chapter on epistocracy, the book addresses an army of straw men. These straw men are placed to teach informal political theory at elite universities. They preach democracy, but apparently not because democracy leads to better outcomes than alternative arrangements. By contrast, the book maintains that democracy is only as good as the outcomes it generates. Duh!

Brennan argues that, perhaps, epistocracy should be given a chance. Perhaps. To some extent, we already have a version of epistocracy. Voters do not directly decide on most policies. (When they do---for instance, in referenda---they often err badly.) The sophisticated individuals lobby, advertise, lie, and argue, thereby hijacking the votes of the less sophisticated.

Successful democracies are delicate systems. No one understands why they succeed, although many can provide a plausible rationalisation for why they might. Brennan has the right instinct: progress not by revolution, but by incremental intelligent design, trial and error.

"The Arrival" (2016)

Linguistic Relativity holds that a language affects the speaker’s worldview or cognition in nontrivial ways. The hypothesis is naive when applied to common languages. There is just not enough variation between the vernacular languages to inculcate individuals to substantially different ways of thinking.

Mathematics and economics are the languages that are sufficiently different from the vernacular, however, to shape reasoning in a distinctive manner. Mathematics makes one act as if arguments are won by persuasion, not by charisma. Economics puts one into the habit of identifying positive-sum games and turns one into a consequentialist.

The best gift of language one can receive are the languages of economics and, by implication, mathematics (which is the hardware on which economics runs). In 1940, Hardy praised pure maths for being useless and, therefore, harmless. We have moved some way forward since then. We have a language that is better than harmless: it is useful in opening up the opportunities to cooperate and in enabling one to think through cooperative strategies.

Snowbound Blues

(Rochester, 2--4 March, 2016)

Competition extinguishes the supply of mediocrity and, with it, through habituation, the demand for mediocrity. Competition depresses the pay. Only the driven and the passionate remain---those musicians who live music and enjoy being alive.

Blues is alive; there is little point in being anything else. The scale seduces. The downbeat uplifts. The rhythm swings. Repetition reassures. The melody is free. The dancers look ahead, invent, for the dance is but a concept waiting to be operationalised.

SnowApple

(Foro del Tejedor, 5 November 2016)

Ambassadors of the periodically unfashionable country of frontiersman, artists, characters, the citizens of the world, they are. It is the country whose governments compete to seduce, whose hymn has a melody to it, whose languages evolve, compete, absorb, whose elite is nonhierarchical.

"Contrapunto" and "El Tiempo Perdido no Vuelve" by CONVEXUS

(Teatro de la Danza, Centro Cultural del Bosque, 23 October 2016)

It is a scary sight: a cargo cult of art. It is the inefficiency that is scary, for it is a symptom of a faulty mechanism.

It is a fallacy to believe that the meaningful must be ugly, depressing, or incoherent. It is easy to veil the incoherent in mystery and to assert that the broken is profound. It is the solution that is hard and requires artistic genius.

Markets promote art (along with porn, Teslas, and laundromats). So do private donations and carefully designed government programmes (especially at early stages, when the means of expression is honed, not the message). If a product would not sell---if a prototype would only attract captive audience---it has no merit.

It is the shift of the focus away from problems and towards solutions that is a key to prosperity.

"The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker (2002)

Refreshingly, Steven Pinker believes in the humanity's ability to cope with truth. The truth he focuses on is that the blank-slate hypothesis is absurd but compelling to whose who seek an easy way to justify or generate the latest fads in political correctness or incorrectness without risking the heavy lifting of rigorous thinking. Pinker argues that scientific truths, whatever they might be, carry no moral imperative. To think otherwise is the naturalistic fallacy. Nor should one confuse one's tastes with morality; to moralise tastes is to sanction violence (i.e., the gratuitous seizure of freedoms) against the individuals whose tastes differ.

Pinker summarises the commonalities between fascism and (the ideology of) Marxism. Both claim the necessity of a violent fight of "us" (Arians or the proletariat) against "them" in order to install the natural order (Social Darwinism or communism), with "us" at the top, thus allegedly maximising the social welfare function by exterminating the inferior others. Both ideologies err in putting the idea before the man. Both ideologies rely on the human tendency to partitions others into an ingroup and an outgroup, thereby courting a negative-sum game where a positive-sum game would have profited all. Marxism, in addition, appeals to the blank-slate hypothesis to justify the stability of the destination state.

At best, an ideology is a scientific theory based on a 300-year-old evidence. At worst, an ideology is a system of beliefs that, to many, feels good to hold and that subjugates those many for the gain of the scheming few. Ideologies feed on the social science that is not methodologically individualistic and whose tenets are thus hard to observe and disprove. Methodologically individualistic social science, by contrast, is easier to discipline by observation and to interface with other sciences, such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology.

Pinker's reasoning is beautiful. He seeks simple fundamental principles, and then tries to explain as much as he can by appealing to these principles. He is not scared of what reasoning may uncover.

"Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson (2002)

It is not the best of all possible worlds---today or at any time or place in the past. But the world is good enough if permeated by mutual respect.

An individual has lived a happy life if he has been given one chance at everything.

It is better to be a misfit and free than a misfit and tamed. It is better to be a misfit than not to be at all.

Having been neither a child nor a parent to anyone in particular, one may take pride in having been a free droplet on the crest of the breaking wave of the civilisation rolling in the right direction.

The Spoils

(The Trafalgar Studios, 25 June 2016)

It is the engineering approach to art, and to life. Identify a problem. Seek a solution. Do not judge. This is also the Enlightenment approach. The Spoils adopts it.

An individual does not choose many of his traits: how tall he is, how handsome (at his ideal weight) he is, and most of his tastes. Different individuals face different costs of trying to suppress in themselves the traits they find undesirable, such as pugnaciousness, impatience, or a blatant disregard for others' wellbeing. As a result, the question often is not how to reform an individual, but how to integrate him into the society, how to learn to live with him or to avoid him. This is the engineering problem in the play.

The proposed solution operationalises the principle voiced by Sarah (played by Katie Brayben): "And even though I don't know if you deserve to hear this, I think the world will be a better place if you do." This principle's compelling operationalisation is to reward desirable traits, behaviours and attitudes, instead of punishing undesirable individuals. An individual is a complex vehicle for traits. He ought not to be extinguished if one---or, indeed, most---of his traits offend. To reward a trait is to give the individual another chance.

Jesse Eisenberg's writing is intelligent. So are his characters. This intelligence is deployed to set up a problem that is nontrivial.

Scott Elliott's direction is impeccable. Each character is alive and is dying to live.

One of the reasons theatre remains commercially viable is that self-censorship in cinema (to secure ratings) remains profitable.

BP Portrait Award 2016

(The National Portrait Gallery, 25 June 2016)

People prefer to see the world in terms of the units they have evolved to understand best: other people. Thus, the primitive people identified the forces of nature with the wills of anthropomorphic gods. Later, somewhat less primitive people conferred human characteristics on ethnicities and nation states and then dedicated their lives to serving the super-human narrative. Today, methodological individualism---the belief that the best way to understand how individuals act as a group is to understand how individuals act individually---is the methodology of choice in the (better) social sciences. (The rather compelling selfish-gene alternative is acknowledged.)

The captivation with the individual is the theme of the Exhibition. The most interesting subject is the one caught in the mid-narrative of his own life or about to disrupt the viewer's life (typical for a portrait), preferably a future life (e.g., Joshua LaRock's Laura In Black or Fiona Graham-Mackay's Sir Andrew Motion) but possibly a past one (Martin Yeoman's Laurie Weedon's D-Day Glider Pilot or Laura Guoke's Petras), or in the mid of a social narrative (typical for candid photography). Intelligence (conveyed by the tentative, sceptical look) and beauty (in the gene of the beholder and conveyed by the countenance of one's beautiful wife, ugly wife, a child, or oneself) evoke the presumption of a narrative.

The London art scene is a single conversation whose goal is to understand the world a little better and nudge it a little forward.

The Threepenny Opera

(The National Theatre, 25 June 2016)

“It is good of you to come back. You did not have to, you know? You could has been outside instead, enjoying this wonderful new country we now have,” said Mack the Knife when opening the second act. The words came an act too late and were met with lukewarm applause. Pandering to the parochial, the play is set at an indeterminate time in London, during coronation. Would not have the audience been able to imagine the 1920s Berlin, the opera's original setting? Should have Shakespeare set Hamlet in Cornwall?

The programme and poster graphic designs project disdain for expertise (or is that the language of condescension towards the plebeian tastes of the working man?), the very disdain that has been feeding the demagogues of late and is partly responsible for the topicality of the second act’s opening lines. The programme is written by the commentators whose myopic ethics of envy give socialism and Marxism bad names. This ethics maintains that there is something moral in dividing humanity into “them” and “us.”

The disdain for expertise does not infect acting. Nick Holder’s performance (as Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum) lives up to his high heels, make-up, and the wig. Rory Kinnear (as Mack the Knife) is duly solemn, precise, and tragic. His is an everyman Mack the Knife, with no outside option in modelling business.

Rufus Norris’s direction is timid, however. Brutality is there, but the zest and abandon of cabaret are missing. The play takes itself a notch too seriously.

The play portrays a Hegelian—in many ways pre-Englightenment—Weltanschauung, wherein the world spirit shuffles around individuals: his pawns, the victims of circumstances.

The Play that Goes Wrong

(The Duchess Theatre, 23 June 2016)

The play makes up in physical farce what it lacks in verbal dexterity. The farce errs on the side of violence, which, on occasion, is gratuitous and does not serve to advance the characterisation.

When individuals are surprised, they either find it scary or funny. If the surprise is threatening or inexplicable, one is scary. If the surprise is pleasant or reveals a hitherto neglected regularity, one finds it funny. The individuals who have a taste for, and are good at, discovering patterns and regularities are those who appreciate, and are capable of, humour most. A society that is open to nonconformist ways of thinking is also a society that is most receptive to humour. A society that seeks to circumscribe the acceptable modes of thinking promotes the scary in art and customs, to project the dangers of thinking outside the received paradigm.

Art, just as science, is a language of hope.

Rudens sonāte

(Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, 16 June 2016)

If one has a moral obligation at all, it is to do what one wishes to do, without gratuitously harming others.

To keep a child happy, parents must first and foremost be happy themselves.

Ģirts Krūmiņš's Viktor is a persuasive Swede for the part: simple. There is contentedness and peace in him. He is a quiet, predictable winter day.

Cerību ezers

(Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, 15 June 2016)

The play consists of a potpourri of snippets and soundbites, perhaps meaningful to the director and evocative for some in the audience, but not adding up to a coherent narrative or a portrait, and hence not adding to the audience's private experience (if any) with the subject matter of the play.

An artist should aspire to deal in the largest unit he can perfect. A theatre production is a complex, delicate enterprise. Rīdzinieki have mastered the art of cafes, which compete with and surpass in their design and ambiance those in Paris and Vienna. Good taste and some worldliness suffice to succeed in design. Scriptwriting and direction require intelligence of a top scientist or engineer---in addition to good taste---and so are scarce.

Exposure to an authoritarian regime conditions an individual to blame authority for his circumstance and attitude to this circumstance. Authoritarian regimes arbitrarily label individuals and pitch them against each other. It is peculiar that individuals would choose to brood on these arbitrary divisions even after the authoritarian regime collapses, instead of choosing to exploit their newly gained freedoms by pursuing art, science, and entrepreneurship.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker (2011)

Steven Pinker is a careful, non-doctrinaire thinker---a position that does not come easily to a scholar not steeped in the aesthetics of mathematics, the aesthetics that illustrates the intense pleasure of discovering truths instead of imposing one's tastes on others. (It suffices that there exist a group of others who share the relevant tastes.)

Pinker's point that the realised violence in the Westernised world has historically declined is persuasive. For making predictions, however, it is the past potential (i.e., expected), not realised, violence that matters. Potential violence may have gone up in the last century, if only due to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. Pinker's goal is not to make predictions, however, but to alert the reader to the fact that one lives in the best of the worlds that have ever existed, which presents one with the extraordinary opportunity to make the world even better and make it last a little longer.

Pinker's unified theory of technological and cultural progress is compelling. These are the restless young who create (and also destroy and degrade). Just as the Internet is believed to help the citizens who hold dissenting beliefs recognise each other and coordinate on an uprising, so did television, radio, and the interstate highways in the 1960s help the young recognise the condition of youth in the millions of others all over the world, declare this condition normal, and resist the excessive civilisation by the old.

Before the authority of the older generation was fruitfully challenged, the authority of the dead and the fictional had been---with the invention of the printing press and the rise of the Republic of Letters. Once the conditions of being alive and sometimes young had been framed as acceptable, the young and the alive found themselves contributing to mainstream culture and technology, instead of armed conflicts, thereby accelerating the progress of the civilisation.

One economist's model of the world derailed and has been cast as one of the evil ideologies of the twentieth century. The perception of the malice in the theory can be traced back to the elevation by the practitioners of the idea of the class struggle to a necessary condition for progress. In the long term, however, those social visions are most fruitful which seek mutually beneficial transactions, not those that artificially pit one social group against the other and dissipate resources in the course of the struggle. Mutually beneficial transactions require ingenuity and empathy (to experience the warm glow from making a gift or recognising others' rights, or to imagine others' needs and innovate); these are not too hard to come by.

Technological and moral progress are intertwined. The free circulation---and an occasional case of theft---of ideas promote both.

An American in Paris

(The Palace Theatre, 26 March 2014)

The production's stars are Bob Crowley, the set designer, and Natasha Katz, the lighting designer. They have found the balance between what should be carved out and painted, and what can be lit up and projected. The projections are not lazy, but necessary.

The desire to merely remake a movie betrays certain timidity of intention. Trevor Nunn would adapt classical musicals by capturing and amplifying their essence, which drew audiences to the big screen in the first place. Christopher Wheeldon's adaptation does not attempt to seduce; it addresses the fans of the genre, and this genre must be classical ballet, whose audience is as conservative as the musical's choreography. This audience will likely be more pleased by attending a performance by the National Ballet of Canada.

The music lacks daring and jazz; it sounds like a recording from an unidentifiable era, inhospitable to the musical's events. Improvisation projects freedom. Syncopations project joy. Sevenths project nuance and depth. These are the signatures of the time in which the story is set, and they are missing from the opening lines, the score, and the book.

The musical is well-acted, well-danced, and well-conceived. But it is a musical that follows, not leads, except, perhaps, in its "The Stairway to Paradise" number.

"Irrational Man" (2015)

Woody Allen’s latest picture is rare in that its title summarises its content perfectly. In the movie, a philosophy professor mistakes his disillusionment with moral philosophy for disillusionment with reason. He advocates following one’s gut feeling, intuition, instinct. The film illustrates how easily unchallenged gut feelings can lead to actions that are not only misguided but plainly evil.

One can be guided by intuition to form hypotheses. But one cannot ever convince another by arguing that one’s intuition is stronger than the other’s. One cannot aggregate knowledge by aggregating intuition.

Mission Fusion Extravaganza

(Foster City, 10--14 March 2016)

Freedom is trust. Trust requires intelligence and the expectation of intelligence. Effective intelligence is scarce if only because wealth is scarce and unequally distributed. Trust requires some commonality of experience or values. The exercise of trust requires the willingness to bear risks. This willingness is facilitated by wealth and also by the culture of restlessness, which promotes novelty seeking.

That freedom leads to joy and that joy (or at least its pursuit) is a worthy goal are relatively new (Enlightenment) ideas, not universally accepted.

fragmenta.dos (o tres)

(Un Teatro, 11 February 2016)

In bad dance, just like in bad poetry, it is hard to hide. Nor is one compelled to hide in dance (or in mathematics or poetry), as one is liable to believe (falsely) that the medium’s abstraction alone must obfuscate sufficiently.

Violence is an instrumental need. When the end is clear and a superior means is available, violence is not demanded. When the vision of the end is blurred, however, violence can bring direct gratification.

The dances prioritise expression over communication. The dancers talk at each other, past each other, but rarely to each other. Skills, just as violence, are embraced instinctively, for their instrumental value, and are deployed to awake, to feel awake, to challenge, to risk—with no clear end.

No narrative is offered or invited; causality is denied; instruction is inaccessible. Aesthetic gratification is limited.

"Markets Without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests" by Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski (2015)

The freedom of speech and the freedom of contracting are analogous in that they both bolster innovation: of ways of life, institutions, goods, and services. Indeed, the freedom of speech may be moot without the freedom of contracting. The purpose of speech is to coordinate individuals on acting differently, on contracting differently.

Brennan and Jaworski make a point that is rather obvious but apparently needs to be reiterated to the self-proclaimed moral philosopher: one cannot build a theory of morality by merely consulting one's prejudice (which is culture-specific) and instinct (which is animalistic). Nor can one make factual statements without consulting facts. Moral philosophy is a branch of social science, whose scientific method it must respect lest it never rise above demagoguery.

Like most men, moral philosophers are ill-equipped to ponder trade-offs. An act is either good or evil, moral or immoral. Rawls advocated the minmax criterion, presumably, because he could not conceive of a way to trade-off one individual's wellbeing against another's. Some moral philosophers today similarly castigate some acts as being so disgusting (to the refined observer) as to warrant an unqualified ban, even if its imposition costs lives. Such a dichotomous approach to morality might have been a decent rule of thumb for the troglodyte, but the modern man is intelligent enough to afford a more nuanced approach.

La Gaviota

(Foro Shakespeare, 25 December 2015)

Chekhov’s plays are about craving freedom from the constricting circumstance. Contemporary American and British theatre is about coping with the freedom. The latter is more intellectually stimulating.

Stage Kiss

(San Francisco Playhouse, 2 January 2016)

In life, one should set out the goals that make for better McGuffins.