(Sadler’s Wells, 23 December 2018)
Certain maturity, intensity of the production were lacking, although the modern (for the 1990s) twists were an improvement on the original narrative. The music was arranged and performed well. The imperfections of the dancers did not quite cohere with the ideal parts they were portraying.
25 December 2018
42nd Street
(Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 22 December 2018)
The 42nd Street is a solid musical with no dramatic depth, with underdeveloped narrative arc, and with no memorable musical numbers (possibly except for the one remembered by Mike Coupe right before his ITV interview). Tap dancing is good. The mood is cheerful.
Weimar-era paintings are rather gory. By contrast, the enduring flicks and musicals from the 1930s and the early 1940s are lighthearted and gay. Two such different recollections of misery may be at least in part due to the technological accident: the cheer of Berlin cabarets was ephemeral, whereas that of Hollywood motion pictures has happened to be preserved on film and then revived, onscreen and onstage. Thus, the streak of optimism that has entered the American DNA may have been accidental.
(Comparisons are delicate because movies and paintings address different audiences, just as movies and theatre do. American optimism is probably mostly due to the consistent inflow of talented, hard-working, and forward-looking immigrants.)
What has kickstarted the US economy after the Great Depression was purportedly the WWII. Later, the Silicon Valley flourished thanks to defence contracts. The challenge is to maintain state support for fundamental science and technology in the absence of the threat of war by betting not on technologies but on outcomes, such as colonising Mars.
The 42nd Street is a solid musical with no dramatic depth, with underdeveloped narrative arc, and with no memorable musical numbers (possibly except for the one remembered by Mike Coupe right before his ITV interview). Tap dancing is good. The mood is cheerful.
Weimar-era paintings are rather gory. By contrast, the enduring flicks and musicals from the 1930s and the early 1940s are lighthearted and gay. Two such different recollections of misery may be at least in part due to the technological accident: the cheer of Berlin cabarets was ephemeral, whereas that of Hollywood motion pictures has happened to be preserved on film and then revived, onscreen and onstage. Thus, the streak of optimism that has entered the American DNA may have been accidental.
(Comparisons are delicate because movies and paintings address different audiences, just as movies and theatre do. American optimism is probably mostly due to the consistent inflow of talented, hard-working, and forward-looking immigrants.)
What has kickstarted the US economy after the Great Depression was purportedly the WWII. Later, the Silicon Valley flourished thanks to defence contracts. The challenge is to maintain state support for fundamental science and technology in the absence of the threat of war by betting not on technologies but on outcomes, such as colonising Mars.
Tell-Tale Heart
(The National Theatre, 21 December 2018)
The play begins with a provocative assertion: art is created by the not very smart as a safe space for the not very smart; art normalises mediocrity. A visit to many a modern art gallery or an exhibition would appear to support this hypothesis. Plays are not immune to mediocrity either, although playwrights do have to pass a literacy test. (Some of the mediocrity one encounters, however, is accidental: the impressionist canon was purchased by Gustave Caillebotte, a patron and himself an artist, on the grounds that it was not good enough to appeal to regular collectors. Caillebotte later bequeathed this canon to the public, while some of the better works remained in private collections.)
Mediocrity in art has three redeeming features. The acceptance of mediocrity unsettles existing social hierarchies by helping a greater number of individuals discover a source of self-esteem. The exposure of the public to mediocrity also illustrates that good art is hard, liable to false starts, and relies on nurturing a flow of ideas, only a fraction of which end up having some merit. Acceptance of mediocre art, on balance, encourages more individuals to engage in art. To the extent that engagement in and with art promotes social cohesion, this sacrifice of quality for quantity is welcome.
Should the government be in the business of promoting mediocre art? Perhaps indirectly so, the way venture capitalists promote more bad entrepreneurs by virtue of promoting more entrepreneurs, (ex-post) good or bad. The case relies on the assumption that markets alone would not provide artists with the funding commensurate with the social benefit that artistic activity generates, and that this under-provision is more severe in art than in, say, biotech.
The government may do more for art by investing in infrastructure and growth-friendly policies than by directly investing in art.
The provocative opening line is the play's high-point. Does the play itself illustrate the value of mediocrity? Is it an NT-worthy failure? Not quite.
The play begins with a provocative assertion: art is created by the not very smart as a safe space for the not very smart; art normalises mediocrity. A visit to many a modern art gallery or an exhibition would appear to support this hypothesis. Plays are not immune to mediocrity either, although playwrights do have to pass a literacy test. (Some of the mediocrity one encounters, however, is accidental: the impressionist canon was purchased by Gustave Caillebotte, a patron and himself an artist, on the grounds that it was not good enough to appeal to regular collectors. Caillebotte later bequeathed this canon to the public, while some of the better works remained in private collections.)
Mediocrity in art has three redeeming features. The acceptance of mediocrity unsettles existing social hierarchies by helping a greater number of individuals discover a source of self-esteem. The exposure of the public to mediocrity also illustrates that good art is hard, liable to false starts, and relies on nurturing a flow of ideas, only a fraction of which end up having some merit. Acceptance of mediocre art, on balance, encourages more individuals to engage in art. To the extent that engagement in and with art promotes social cohesion, this sacrifice of quality for quantity is welcome.
Should the government be in the business of promoting mediocre art? Perhaps indirectly so, the way venture capitalists promote more bad entrepreneurs by virtue of promoting more entrepreneurs, (ex-post) good or bad. The case relies on the assumption that markets alone would not provide artists with the funding commensurate with the social benefit that artistic activity generates, and that this under-provision is more severe in art than in, say, biotech.
The government may do more for art by investing in infrastructure and growth-friendly policies than by directly investing in art.
The provocative opening line is the play's high-point. Does the play itself illustrate the value of mediocrity? Is it an NT-worthy failure? Not quite.
“Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou (2018)
One cannot short a startup. Therefore, before investing in a company, it is important to note not only who has aleady invested in it (and whether investors are likely to have performed due diligence), but also who has refrained from investing.
For success, wishful thinking is insufficient, although typically necessary. Charisma is neither necessary nor sufficient. Nor is dropping out of college. One of the essential skills that one learns in college is the ability to identify nonsensical discourse, even one's own.
The society will extrapolate one’s successes and failures onto similar others. One has no moral obligation to internalise this externality. By contrast, those who regard themselves as being in the business of social engineering may wish (but, again, have no moral obligation) to account for this externality. Lawyers do so when they seek a perfect victim to file a civil rights suit.
Countries have historically competed in military might, not in product markets. International law enforcement is weak. International mobility is costly. It is simpler to steal than to innovate.
Companies are not inherently different but are constrained by the state’s monopoly on violence. Even then, whenever not controlled by a mob, companies control armies of lawyers, media, and politicians.
Any remotely fair, efficient, and reliable mode of social organisation is likely have much redundancy, seek excessive compromise, and, so, be rather far from the first-best.
“How to Be Parisian wherever You Are” by Caroline de Maigret, Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, and Sophie Mas (2014)
Being a Parisianne is making most of one’s circumstances, which, here, are Paris: high-density urban living, among benevolent snobs and a handful of friends; small apartments; and a subtle equilibrium in "what we do with what is done to us” (Sartre's definition of freedom).
Sometimes, in order to be X, one must not be born X. It is only by consciously deciding to be X that one can confidently inhabit X.
Why would one want to be a Parisian wherever one is? One may naturally be a Parisian to begin with, and it is reassuring to know one is not alone in one's constructed world. One may also wish, if not to be someone else for a while, then at least to be aware of alternative ways of being.
Sometimes, in order to be X, one must not be born X. It is only by consciously deciding to be X that one can confidently inhabit X.
Why would one want to be a Parisian wherever one is? One may naturally be a Parisian to begin with, and it is reassuring to know one is not alone in one's constructed world. One may also wish, if not to be someone else for a while, then at least to be aware of alternative ways of being.
15 December 2018
Twin Peaks: the Return (2017), Revisited
Twin Peaks is a shared dream.
Everyone lives in a dream, his own world, most of the time. On few occasions, individuals meet to share the dream. There's often music in the air on such occasions.
Everyone lives in a dream, his own world, most of the time. On few occasions, individuals meet to share the dream. There's often music in the air on such occasions.
A conversation is a dance. The dance reduces the conversation to its essence. It removes the middle-man, the macguffin, the plot, the purported meaning. Twin Peaks, like a dance, dismisses the middleman.
Most of the time, one is in the Black Lodge, the waiting room. What is remembered, is the finite time outside, on earth. One should make most of it.
Most of the time, one is in the Black Lodge, the waiting room. What is remembered, is the finite time outside, on earth. One should make most of it.
Today, characters are no longer developed in the legacy world but online. Relationships are cultivated online. What will the movies set in the present look like? Will action ever be spectacular again?
"Autofagia" by Arturo Rivera
(El Claustro de Sor Juana, 17 November 2018)
Rivera cures pain by conjuring up beauty, which he distills from pain itself and from freedom.
Rivera cures pain by conjuring up beauty, which he distills from pain itself and from freedom.
Brodsky/Baryshnikov
(Kultuurikatel, 13 December 2018)
In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit blurs the logical distinction between one's selves, past and future, and others. With identity interrupted, it is as appropriate to say goodbye to one's selves as it is to say goodbye to others' selves, repeatedly. Or one can choose not to look back and to inhabit instead the present self the best one can. Alvis Hermanis's play explores the former.
One gets much practice dying. In the process, one learns to attach oneself to something bigger than oneself. One outlines one's shadows with a marker in the memories of fellow travellers, present and future. If one does so skilfully, such memories are welcome.
Baryshnikov reads poetry well. He dances it well. His moves defy age. The emergent language is universal.
Poetry and dance are the only artistic media that demand the artist to be completely naked.
In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit blurs the logical distinction between one's selves, past and future, and others. With identity interrupted, it is as appropriate to say goodbye to one's selves as it is to say goodbye to others' selves, repeatedly. Or one can choose not to look back and to inhabit instead the present self the best one can. Alvis Hermanis's play explores the former.
One gets much practice dying. In the process, one learns to attach oneself to something bigger than oneself. One outlines one's shadows with a marker in the memories of fellow travellers, present and future. If one does so skilfully, such memories are welcome.
Baryshnikov reads poetry well. He dances it well. His moves defy age. The emergent language is universal.
Poetry and dance are the only artistic media that demand the artist to be completely naked.
12 December 2018
“Stubborn Attachments” by Tyler Cowen (2018)
1.
Cowen’s book makes a case for, and traces out the consequences of, a low discount rate for the welfare of future generations.
Suppose time machines were freely available and cheap. Then we would pretty much know the (assume, immutable) time horizon allotted to our civilisation the way we know the boundaries of the continents. Just as we do not discount the lives of the people who live by the sea, we would be loathe to discount the lives of the people who live close to the time horizon. It is true that those living close to the time horizon would have less rewarding lives because they cannot savour the bright futures of their progeny. This reduction in welfare affects the horizon people directly, however; there is no reason to double-count this reduction by explicitly discounting their welfare. Similarly, while the lives of the horizon people will not be remembered fondly by post-horizon people (of which there won’t be any), this omission is already accounted for in the (nonexistent) utilities of the post-horizon people.
The book makes three heroic assumptions: values cannot be derived from preferences, human rights are irreducible concepts, and faith is indispensable. All three are unnecessary for the book’s thesis.
Why assume that values do not come from preferences? One can justify many an atrocity by simply postulating that it is good for you. Furthermore, certainly the philosopher who postulates values has preferences over values. Why deny a nonphilosopher the right to nominate his values?
Rights (e.g., the right of a born baby to live or the right of the old to be taken care of) can be derived from incentive considerations, incentives to trust each other and cooperate toward the betterment of the world included. Of course, rights can be useful approximations, rules of thumb that capture robust properties of the maximisation of some grand objective. But, in this case, rights are not irreducible; their relative merits can be analysed rigorously.
What’s faith? Even if one were to accept the book’s assertion that one should have faith (or, at any rate, stupid people should have it, for, allegedly, they cannot motivate themselves to care enough about future generations by the power of rational thought alone), what is this faith? And who is in charge of it? The same philosopher who is in charge of values? And who is this philosopher accountable to? If we take a coherent mathematical argument and then suppress all equations, we do not call it “faith”; we call it Keynes’s General Theory. The reader is free to trust Keynes, be skeptical of Keynes’s reasoning, or scrutinise and challenge his reasoning. While trust in Keynes, as trust in any expert, is acceptable, blind faith damages the society in the long term.
Book’s occasional departures from consequentialism are puzzling. If an urn has red and blue balls, and we do not know how many of each, then we might admit to having no good argument for betting on one colour over the other in a fair bet. But if a dog gets its leg broken if you bet on red but not on blue, perhaps it is better to bet on blue. Ditto when being torn while deciding which beach to send the attacking troops to. All this ambiguity can make it harder to choose, but to acknowledge ambiguity does not require one to abandon consequentialism.
2.
Putting future generations on equal footing with present generations (which is the right thing to do unless future generations resemble octopi and superintelligent robots more than they resemble us) not only introduces certain moral obligations toward those generations but also justifies our taxing them. We want the future generations to be rich, so that we could tax them more. One way to tax future generations is to bequeath them the riddles (such as the climate change) that we find too costly to think about in return for bequeathing them the tools (such as a larger and better educated population and a larger body of scientific knowledge) to tackle these riddles.
3.
Foregoing the primacy of individual preferences in moral philosophy handicaps our ability to reason about the following question, raised towards the end of the book: Why care about nondomesticated animals and to what extent? (The emphasis on the nondomesticated betrays the limits of the author’s commitment not to derive morality from preferences.) One may further wonder: If we ought to care more about smarter animals, should we also care more about humans with a higher IQ? And should we care even more about superhuman silicon-based intelligence? Maybe. Maybe not. In the absence of a compelling theory, we should just rely on individual preferences, aggregated in some manner. It is true that this approach is inherently speciest because it is grounded in consulting human preferences, not animal preferences. But then any theory that humans will ever construct will be speciest in this (tautological) sense of having originated with humans; there is no escape.
One may also ask whether one ought to expect common interspecies morality, say, between humans and octopi. That is, should we expect humans to put the same relative weights on the welfare of humans and octopi as octopi do? If not, should we be compelled to conclude that either humans or octopi, or both, are immoral? And if it is not immoral for humans to overweigh the welfare of humans and for octopi to overweight the welfare of octopi, is it then perfectly moral for short people to overweigh the welfare of short people, and for tall people to overweight the welfare of tall people? In politics, we can confort ourselves by believing that Conservatives advocate a conservative agenda not because they believe that the interests of Conservatives should come first but because they believe that the Conservative agenda is more correct. With short and tall people, it is hard to tell the same story.
Cowen’s book makes a case for, and traces out the consequences of, a low discount rate for the welfare of future generations.
Suppose time machines were freely available and cheap. Then we would pretty much know the (assume, immutable) time horizon allotted to our civilisation the way we know the boundaries of the continents. Just as we do not discount the lives of the people who live by the sea, we would be loathe to discount the lives of the people who live close to the time horizon. It is true that those living close to the time horizon would have less rewarding lives because they cannot savour the bright futures of their progeny. This reduction in welfare affects the horizon people directly, however; there is no reason to double-count this reduction by explicitly discounting their welfare. Similarly, while the lives of the horizon people will not be remembered fondly by post-horizon people (of which there won’t be any), this omission is already accounted for in the (nonexistent) utilities of the post-horizon people.
The book makes three heroic assumptions: values cannot be derived from preferences, human rights are irreducible concepts, and faith is indispensable. All three are unnecessary for the book’s thesis.
Why assume that values do not come from preferences? One can justify many an atrocity by simply postulating that it is good for you. Furthermore, certainly the philosopher who postulates values has preferences over values. Why deny a nonphilosopher the right to nominate his values?
Rights (e.g., the right of a born baby to live or the right of the old to be taken care of) can be derived from incentive considerations, incentives to trust each other and cooperate toward the betterment of the world included. Of course, rights can be useful approximations, rules of thumb that capture robust properties of the maximisation of some grand objective. But, in this case, rights are not irreducible; their relative merits can be analysed rigorously.
What’s faith? Even if one were to accept the book’s assertion that one should have faith (or, at any rate, stupid people should have it, for, allegedly, they cannot motivate themselves to care enough about future generations by the power of rational thought alone), what is this faith? And who is in charge of it? The same philosopher who is in charge of values? And who is this philosopher accountable to? If we take a coherent mathematical argument and then suppress all equations, we do not call it “faith”; we call it Keynes’s General Theory. The reader is free to trust Keynes, be skeptical of Keynes’s reasoning, or scrutinise and challenge his reasoning. While trust in Keynes, as trust in any expert, is acceptable, blind faith damages the society in the long term.
Book’s occasional departures from consequentialism are puzzling. If an urn has red and blue balls, and we do not know how many of each, then we might admit to having no good argument for betting on one colour over the other in a fair bet. But if a dog gets its leg broken if you bet on red but not on blue, perhaps it is better to bet on blue. Ditto when being torn while deciding which beach to send the attacking troops to. All this ambiguity can make it harder to choose, but to acknowledge ambiguity does not require one to abandon consequentialism.
2.
Putting future generations on equal footing with present generations (which is the right thing to do unless future generations resemble octopi and superintelligent robots more than they resemble us) not only introduces certain moral obligations toward those generations but also justifies our taxing them. We want the future generations to be rich, so that we could tax them more. One way to tax future generations is to bequeath them the riddles (such as the climate change) that we find too costly to think about in return for bequeathing them the tools (such as a larger and better educated population and a larger body of scientific knowledge) to tackle these riddles.
3.
Foregoing the primacy of individual preferences in moral philosophy handicaps our ability to reason about the following question, raised towards the end of the book: Why care about nondomesticated animals and to what extent? (The emphasis on the nondomesticated betrays the limits of the author’s commitment not to derive morality from preferences.) One may further wonder: If we ought to care more about smarter animals, should we also care more about humans with a higher IQ? And should we care even more about superhuman silicon-based intelligence? Maybe. Maybe not. In the absence of a compelling theory, we should just rely on individual preferences, aggregated in some manner. It is true that this approach is inherently speciest because it is grounded in consulting human preferences, not animal preferences. But then any theory that humans will ever construct will be speciest in this (tautological) sense of having originated with humans; there is no escape.
One may also ask whether one ought to expect common interspecies morality, say, between humans and octopi. That is, should we expect humans to put the same relative weights on the welfare of humans and octopi as octopi do? If not, should we be compelled to conclude that either humans or octopi, or both, are immoral? And if it is not immoral for humans to overweigh the welfare of humans and for octopi to overweight the welfare of octopi, is it then perfectly moral for short people to overweigh the welfare of short people, and for tall people to overweight the welfare of tall people? In politics, we can confort ourselves by believing that Conservatives advocate a conservative agenda not because they believe that the interests of Conservatives should come first but because they believe that the Conservative agenda is more correct. With short and tall people, it is hard to tell the same story.
8 December 2018
While You Were Sleeping (1995)
It is a perfect picture: Each dialogue is broken up into musical phrases each of which ends with a joke. Characters are worldly enough not to laugh at their own jokes. Screen time is apportioned according to merit. The plot is not propped up by characters' stupid decisions. Instead, everyone who gets a hand at controlling the plot acts responsibly. The movie does not solicit donations.
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