Monthly Archives: May 2013

Deadly Edge by Richard Stark

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This time, tough guy Parker steals the cash from a rock concert. He and his colleagues get away with the loot, but there’s a loose end and two bad guys find out about the job. They go after Parker and the rest of his gang. As usual, they should have stopped before they got to Parker: “If someone double-crossed him in a job, tried to take Parker’s share of the split or betray him to the law, everything else became unimportant until he had evened the score”.

This is a typical Parker novel, more plausible than some. The author (real name: Donald Westlake) builds suspense by shifting between Parker’s perspective and his girlfriend’s. She gets into a serious jam and is left hanging while we backtrack to Parker, who can’t immediately come to her aid.

Parker is the perfect guy to have on your side if you have a problem with a couple of dangerous, greedy malcontents. The foreword to the novel says that “in some ways, Parker is the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, the consummate hard-toiling craftsman whose craft just happens to be robbery” — and the mayhem that’s part of the craft in Parker’s universe.

Philosophers and the One Right Answer

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A very bright guy named Richard Marshall interviews academic philosophers at a site called 3 A.M. Magazine (as of his latest interview, Mr. Marshall is still “biding his time”).

This is from an interview with Thom Brooks of Durham University:

“Hegel’s Science of Logic reveals a fascinating insight into the philosophy of punishment. He writes that punishment should not be considered as either retribution, deterrence or rehabilitation. Instead, punishment is grounded in retribution – those punished must deserve it and cannot be innocent – but retribution is only one part of a larger view. Punishment is not retributivist, preventative or rehabilitative, but rather all three in one. Three in one. Why would we expect to find anything different in Hegel than this anyway?”

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/in-search-of-global-justice/

With all due respect to Hegel (one of the most influential yet incomprehensible philosophers ever), is it really a fascinating insight to note that punishment is justifiable for different reasons? Philosophers are too often prone to seek a single justification or analysis for some phenomenon. Philosophical arguments can sometimes remind you of that beer commercial (“Tastes great! No, less filling!”). 

The entry on “Punishment” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an example of this tendency:

“The practice of punishment must be justified by reference either to forward-looking or to backward-looking considerations [or both?].

If the former prevail, then the theory is consequentialist and probably some version of utilitarianism, according to which the point of the practice of punishment is to increase overall net social welfare by reducing (ideally, preventing) crime.

If the latter prevail, the theory is deontological; on this approach, punishment is seen either as a good in itself or as a practice required by justice, thus making a direct claim on our allegiance. A deontological justification of punishment is likely to be a retributive justification.

Or, as a third alternative, the justification of the practice may be found in some hybrid combination of these two independent alternatives. Recent attempts to avoid this duality in favor of a completely different approach [such as saying that neither theory captures the whole truth?] have yet to meet with much success…”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/punishment/

Practically speaking, meeting with “success” in this case means being found convincing by other academic philosophers. It might be that recent attempts to avoid this duality haven’t been successful because most philosophers interested in punishment (and ethics in general) are committed to an either/or solution, finding the single right answer. There is relatively little to be gained, professionally speaking, by pointing out that both sides of a traditional argument reflect part of the truth.

What sometimes happens in philosophical argument (aka “combat”) is that philosopher A offers his theory and philosopher B suggests a counterexample. Philosopher B then offers her theory and philosopher A suggests a counterexample. Philosopher C then concludes that neither theory is successful. An alternative approach would be to agree that the counterexamples show that neither theory captures the whole truth, although they each capture some of the truth. Then everyone could pack up and go have a drink (or a slice of pie).

The Most Successful Hunters in the World?

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Biologists report that dragonflies capture their prey 95% of the time. That’s an amazing success rate. They’re such good hunters because they have huge eyes, four wings that move independently, and brains that allow them to track their prey as well as human hunters track theirs.

They’ve been successfully hunting for 300 million years. Our ancestors started walking on two legs about 6 million years ago.

Now, however, we’re letting our machines do the hunting (cf. the really cool drones in Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s latest). Much of the research on dragonflies is being sponsored by the Pentagon. 

This article includes more information and some impressive video (it’s hard to be a hungry frog):

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/dragonflies-natures-deadly-drone-but-prettier.html?src=me&ref=general

An Ingenious Device for Avoiding Thought

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The principal speaker at our son’s graduation yesterday was Vermont novelist Chris Bohjalian. He was excellent. He got a deserved standing ovation. Aside from advising the graduates to “stay here!” (that was a joke, but not a completely bad piece of advice), he argued for, among other things, the importance of reading.

As a reader, I didn’t disagree with what he said. Not everyone, however, is of the same opinion.

It’s always bothered me that I’d often finish a book and shortly thereafter not remember much about it. So when I retired a few years ago, I started writing a brief response to every book I finished on a blog I called Retirement Reading. Now I had a semi-permanent record of the books I was reading.

Keeping a record of what I’d read reminded me of a summer long ago when I kept a list of books I’d finished in order to win a prize or something. (Several of the terrific Doctor Doolittle and Wizard of Oz  books appeared on my list that summer.)

Last week, I decided to move the contents of Retirement Reading over here to WordPress (goodbye, Google). Trying to think of a good title (since it’s never been a blog about Medicare or where to retire), I looked through some quotations regarding books and reading. Some famous authors had some surprising things to say on the topic:

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” — Albert Einstein

“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“Learn as much by writing as by reading.” — Lord Acton

“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.” — Sir Arthur Helps (who? — 19th century author, politician, etc.)

They weren’t all negative, of course:

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sir Arthur won:

http://ingeniousdevice.wordpress.com/

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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Growing up in California, surrounded by towns with names like Santa Monica and San Bernardino, it was easy to assume that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was set in California in the 20th century. The novel is actually set in Peru in 1714. A major bridge between Lima and Cuzco collapses and five people fall to their deaths. A priest wonders why God decided these particular people should die, spends six years looking into their lives and writes a book telling what he learned.

Unfortunately, only the first and last chapters of this short novel refer to the priest, his search for meaning and his book. The other chapters are written in the voice of an omniscient narrator who explains how these five unfortunate people ended up on that bridge on that day. 

One of the victims is a neurotic aristocrat; another is her servant. Another is a neurotic young man, born an orphan and a twin. The last two are an older man, the mentor of a neurotic actress, and the actress’s young son. It seems unlikely that there were so many neurotic people in Peru in 1714, but since the novel was written in 1927, perhaps Thornton Wilder was influenced too much by Freud. None of the characters are especially interesting; most are especially annoying. The language of the novel suggests its setting and time period, but there are too many references to supposedly famous Spaniards and Peruvians whose names (real or fictitious) will mean nothing to a modern reader.

In the foreword to this edition, the novelist Russell Banks claims that The Bridge of San Luis Rey is “as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature”. I thought it was tedious and the characters were unconvincing. Reading about their psychological turmoil seemed pointless.

At the end of the novel, Wilder writes: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five shall have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten….There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”. It’s a worthy conclusion, but not one that’s demonstrated in the pages of this disappointing book.  (4/18/13)