Thinking in Dangerous Times

Mar 03, 2024

Welcome to Wayfinding(s)! Go here to learn more about the newsletter (and about me).

NOTE: I’ll see you next on March 17.

LOOKING AHEAD: March 6 is National Frozen Food Day. March 8 is National Proofreading Day. March 11 is Debunking Day. PLAN ACCORDINGLY!

I was thinking that Baruch Spinoza is having a bit of a moment right now with all the books being written about him. But actually, he has been having a moment since he died in 1677. Two recent articles reference a new book by Ian Buruma, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, published a couple weeks ago. One, in The New York Times, is by the author himself. The other, in The New Yorker, by Adam Kirsch, a literary critic on faculty at Columbia University.

An article about Ian Buruma would be interesting in and of itself, and speaks to his interest in this Dutch philosopher Spinoza. Buruma was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands. His father was a Dutch lawyer and son of a Mennonite minister. His mother was a Briton of German-Jewish descent. He holds a degree in Chinese literature and history with post graduate work in Japan studying Japanese cinema. He briefly served as editor of The New York Review of Books. All of that is to say that he has quite a wide-ranging background. Having freedom of thought is something that, of course, would have sparked his imagination.

Spinoza’s family were Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Catholicism under the Portuguese Inquisition, but who continued, as conversos, to secretly practice their Judaism. His parents left Portugal for a new life in Amsterdam in the early 1600s. Buruma tells us that Spinoza (born in 1632) and his brother were the first of several generations of his family “to be born as a Jew, not a crypto-Jew.” To earn a living, Spinoza worked as a lens grinder for the glass used in microscopes and telescopes, but pursued philosophy, adhering to life as a free-thinker at a very early age. His thoughts about religion so enraged the rabbis of his Sephardic Jewish community that he was excommunicated at the age of 23. His commitment to being a free thinker had to withstand being forbidden ever again to interact with his family, live among his community or do business with them.

In 1668, recognizing the grip of religion and others who had suffered for their dissent, he anonymously published, “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.” (Prior to that, he had only published one book, a guide to Rene Déscartes.) “Tractatus” was a Latin treatise that maintained the best policy in religious matters to be “allowing every man to think what he likes, and say what he thinks.” It’s noted that Spinoza wrote in Latin so as not to incite “the multitudes,” but rather to address the more educated who might be receptive to his ideas. Though the book was published anonymously, he was soon “found out.”

Spinoza rejected the idea that he was an atheist. Kirsch explains Spinoza’s concept of God:

“God is ‘a being absolutely infinite,’ and the idea of infinity ‘involves no negation’: it would be contradictory to say that there is some quality an infinite being does not possess or some space it does not occupy. It is therefore impossible for God to be somewhere—up in Heaven, perhaps—but not here, where we are. If God exists, then he must be absolutely everywhere; not even our own bodies and minds can be separate from him.”

He continued to have tremendous influence on thinkers following his death despite how scandalously his life had been viewed. Kirsch relates that:

“Spinoza’s idea that God was not a thinking or creative being but nature itself was considered so scandalous that George Eliot, the British novelist who translated Spinoza’s “Ethics” in the 1850s, still insisted that her name not be mentioned in connection with the thinker she unreservedly admired.”

Once excommunicated, Spinoza surrounded himself with like-minded thinkers, mostly liberal Protestants, who Jonathan Israel, one of his biographers, argues helped to create:

“…the Radical Enlightenment, a tradition of political and religious thought that would transform the modern world. Democratic ideas that were punishable by imprisonment in the sixteen-sixties became the watchwords of the American and French Revolutions a century later.”

Once again, in our time, Spinoza’s writings speak to our fight for democracy and the importance of belief in science. As Kirsch states:

“Spinoza writes that democracy is ‘of all forms of government the most natural, and the most consonant with individual liberty,’ and that the best antidote to superstition is the study of science, ‘since the less men know of nature the more easily can they coin fictitious ideas.’”

Examining the thinking of Spinoza now feels so pertinent to the time we are in and the extraordinary challenges to freedom of thought and what kind of governance we will collectively choose. Buruma argues that “living now as we do in a time of book-banning, intellectual intolerance, religious bigotry and populist demagoguery, his radical advocacy of freedom still seems fresh and urgent.” And Buruma points out, the challenge doesn’t just come from one side:

“liberal thinking is being challenged from many sides where ideologies are increasingly entrenched, by bigoted reactionaries as well as by progressives who believe there can be no deviation from their chosen paths to justice.”

Recognizing that his thinking was radical, Spinoza wore a ring inscribed in Latin, “Caute,” “Be cautious,” and conducted his life in that manner. He left all his work following “Tractatus” in manuscript form to be published by his friends after his death. He died at forty-four from a lung condition, perhaps linked to his inhaling glass from his work as a lens grinder.

The 17^th- Century Heretic We Could Really Use Right Now | The New York Times | February 20, 2024

Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024

THE UNDER TOAD

The title character in “The World According to Garp,” whose son mistakenly hears someone referring to an undertow at the beach, “subsequently use[s] the phrase ‘under toad’ to refer to the omnipresent threat of disaster that lies beneath the surface of everyday life.” (as described in Wordsense)

This week the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case, as one headline put it, “to decide if states can control fate of social media.” It’s a thorny issue tied up with interpretation and application of the First Amendment.

It stems from a case brought to determine whether a pair of laws, passed in Texas and Florida, prohibiting platforms from removing posts or suspending accounts are constitutional. In short, can platforms do content moderation – i.e., can they kick Trump off Facebook? Republicans created these laws in response to concerns that conservatives were being censored for their political views. The Court’s decision will have broad-reaching ramifications either way it decides. On one hand the tech companies use the First Amendment as a shield and ruling in their favor to declare the laws unconstitutional could give the companies the right to oppose any regulation. On the other hand, ruling in favor of upholding the laws could allow all sorts of misinformation and harmful activities to flourish online.

Are social media companies public utilities like the phone service or electric company? Or are they media organizations like The New York Times or The Washington Post? If they are public utilities then they are accountable to government regulations. If they are media organizations, they’re accountable to the courts. It’s one or the other, but to date, they have tried to have it both ways. When attacked by conservatives, the companies contend that they are media companies that can’t be forced to publish content they don’t wish to. When attacked by the left, they contend they are just pipelines for information (i.e., utilities) and can’t be held responsible for misinformation and spreading hate speech.

But the cavalry is coming…perhaps! In WIRED, Jaron Lanier, stalwart tech guru and critic, and Allison Stanger make a case for resolving the conflict by getting rid of Section 230, 26 words from the Communications Decency Act of 1996:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Lanier and Stanger contend that the definition of speech has changed from the time this was written due to the means and scale of amplification, the control that algorithms now have over the virality of speech. They further contend that Section 230 perpetuates the idea that social media companies are common carriers, argue that they are not, and maintain that Section 230 becomes an even greater problem in the era of generative AI.

They assert that we need high quality communication which would then result in higher quality AI, as AI is being trained on the contents of the internet. That only would be possible without the incentives offered by Section 230 which has resulted in the current business models that demand attention-getting engagement rather than high quality communication.

Section 230, originally written to encourage early internet innovation, may have outlived its usefulness.

The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything | WIRED | February 13, 2024

Supreme Court to decide if states can control fate of social media | The Washington Post | February 25, 2024

Social media companies are not the same as public utilities | The Washington Post | February 28, 2024

BEST QUOTE OF THE WEEK…THE MONTH…THE YEAR

It was announced in early February that Vroman’s Bookstore, a community landmark in Pasadena, CA, family-owned for 130 years, is up for sale. The article quotes a longtime customer who has conveyed her final wishes to her children. She said,

“I’ve already told them, when I pass, cremate me, spread my ashes in Vroman’s Bookstore. Just a little bit, here and there – because that’s where I want to end up.”

I can’t think of a better way to spend eternity.

IN DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY

As a 2024 public service and for us to ponder, I am continuing to highlight one lesson each newsletter from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, in each subsequent installment of this newsletter — with no additional editorial comment. This is the fifth lesson.

5. Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

ON THE MUSICAL SIDE

In keeping with talk of a Portuguese philosopher, I offer some Portuguese fado. Fado is a Portuguese musical genre that dates back to at least the early 1800s. Pereira da Costa is “considered to be the first and only woman to professionally master the traditional Portuguese guitar used in fado music.” Here she is in a Tiny Desk Concert with guitarist João José Pita and percussionist Pedro Segundo.

Dulce Pontes is a singer-songwriter “who contributed to the 1990s revival of this urban folk music called fado.”

Terra/Movimento/Encontro/Minha Alma/Dia de Feira | Marta Pereira da Costa | NPR Tiny Desk Concert (November 15, 2023)

Fado Portugues | Dulce Pontes | 1996

Meu Amor sem Aranjuez (Joaquín Rodrigo) | Dulce Pontes | 2017