Ever since it became evident that Trump was likely to be re-elected, I’ve been among the most pessimistic of commentators on the likely course of US politics (most recently here for example). I’ve also been nowhere near pessimistic enough. I assumed that Trump would follow the course of dictators like Putin and Orban, gradually eroding freedom and making his own power permanent. Instead, he’s gone most of the way inside a year.

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So the Trump administration has just pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, WHO.

WHO is the biggest and most important international health organization. It’s an arm of the United Nations.  It’s been around since 1948. Almost every country in the world is a member.

Most people have only the vaguest idea of what WHO is or what it does. Teal deer, they do a lot of different stuff, most of it pretty good. They were crucial to eliminating smallpox a while back. They come up with cool ideas like a list of essential medicines and health care products that are cheap and easy to produce, along with easy how-to guides on producing them. They do all sorts of research, especially on public health. They were deeply involved in controlling Ebola. (You haven’t heard much about Ebola lately, right? Thank USAID and WHO.)

To be fair, WHO also has some significant negatives. It’s part of the UN system, so it skews slow and inefficient. WHO leadership did not handle COVID well… I mean, they really did not handle COVID well. They made bad, dumb choices based on not offending (some) member countries, and then they doubled down. It wasn’t great.

But anyway! I have one personal story about WHO, from my time in development, below the cut.

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This was triggered by a post over at our long-term friendly-rival blog, LGM. That post, in turn, was triggered by something stupid that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently.

What Kennedy said: he thinks his distinctive hoarse, raspy voice is “spasmodic dysphonia”, which he suspects may have been caused by taking flu vaccines for years.  Because dysphonia is a KNOWN side effect of these dangerous vaccines!  So he stopped getting flu shots back in 2005.

Blogger Shakezula quite correctly deconstructs this nonsense (only one flu shot lists dysphonia as a possible side effect, and that one wasn’t available until after 2005; if dysphonia is a side effect, it’s ridiculously rare, and nobody seems to have ever encountered it).  But then they make a wrong turn:  they suggest that maybe RFK’s weird voice is genetic, because his sister also has a kinda weird voice.

No.  No no no.  
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The Australian government’s legislation seeking to ban access to social media for people under 16 has received plenty of attention in International media, mostly leading with the government’s that 4.7 million accounts were banned or deactivated when the legislation came into effect. Rather less attention has been paid to discussion of the outcome within Australia, where the consensus is that there has been very little effect for most. With most kids still active, the minority who have been caught by the ban have suffered feelings of ostracism and exclusion When discussing the issue on my own social media (which had few if any teenage readers to begin with) I’ve only had one parent report their kids being thrown off.

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As part of my critique of pro-natalism, I’m looking at the philosophical foundations of the idea. Most of the explicit discussion takes place within the framework of consequentialism (the idea that the best actions or policies are those with the best consequences) and particularly of utilitarianism, broadly defined to say that the best consequences are those which maximise some aggregate function of individual happiness or wellbeing. Other philosophical traditions either avoid the issue (for example Rawls’ theory of justice) or offer little that can illuminate debate over population numbers (for example, virtue ethics).

Looking at the utilitarian analysis immediately creates a puzzle. All the early utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill supported population limitation. They accepted Malthus’ claim that, in the absence of limitation, population growth would inevitably reduce the great majority of people to subsistence. But unlike Malthus, who used this argument to say that attempts to make the poor better off were futile (he rejected birth control as “vice”) the early utilitarians accepted the desirability of limiting family size.

Most notable among this group was Francis Place. Taking significant legal risks in the repressive climate of the time, Place sought to spread information about contraceptive methods in pamphlets such as Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (1822).

Importantly, and in contrast to many 20th century Malthusians, Place rejected coercive measures, placing his trust in families to make prudent decisions given access to information and the methods of family planning. Except for his failure (unsurprising at the time) to consider possible conflict within households, Place’s position stands up very well 200 years later.

The classical utilitarians argued for public policies which promoted the welfare of the community to which they applied, on the basis of “each to count for one, and none for more than one”. This applied both to the current population and to the children who would actually be born as a result of their choices, but not to hypothetical additional people who might raise the sum of total utility.

By contrast, contemporary utilitarian philosophy yields bizarre spectacles like “longtermism” which implies that our primary goal should be to produce as many descendants as possible provided that the result is an increase in aggregate utility. This is taking Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”, which I criticised here, to its logical limit.

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It is undisputed that Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973), a German exile, who, after a long stint at The New School reached prominence at The University of Chicago, became the founder of a ‘school’ of academics who found a home mostly in political theory, but also in literature and philosophy. Most members of the school write on political theory broadly conceived. His writings are dense and not infrequently commentary on books written by long-dead authors (including, it is worth noting, medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers). Because many of his students, and their students, ended up training public intellectuals, think tankers, and advisors associated with Republican politicians and administrations (including many so-called ‘neo-cons’), the study of Strauss and his school has itself become intensely politicized. There have been Straussians, who have resisted the rightward drift of the school, and (in recent memory) the rise of MAGA (including “Never Trump Straussians” many of whom once associated with the ‘neo-cons’).

I took classes with a number of Straussians at The University of Chicago. In these courses Strauss was never taught. I also played basketball with some of their students. Joseph Cropsey (1919 – 2012), one of Strauss’ earliest American admirers and collaborators and an important Adam Smith scholar, adored my Bullmastiff. He would indulge me in long walks so he could spend time with my dog, and I could ask him questions about his views on Smith. I have written on his work in the philosophy of economics (here).

Later, at Syracuse University, my senior colleague, José Benardete (1928 – 2016), whose brother (Seth Benardete) was one of the more prominent students of Strauss, became a highly valued mentor. During most of our lunches, he talked about Wallace Stevens. José had many intellectual debts to Strauss, which he did not hide in his work, but he had also embarked on an intellectual career that was not confined to political theory. In fact, on my somewhat quixotic interpretation of twentieth-century philosophy, José helped revive the study of metaphysics during the period of positivist dominance within analytic philosophy (alongside others at Syracuse and Rochester). There is an interesting question why David Lewis went all the way to Australia rather than Upstate New York for his intellectual nourishment, but that’s for another occasion.

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For the last year or so, left-leaning UK voters have been subjected to the looming nightmare that Reform – a bunch of xenophobes and welfare-state-slashers – might form the next government. There has been very little silver lining to this. The one bit of schadenfreude to be gleaned is the impending annihilation of the Conservatives as an electoral force. For someone (like me) who grew up in the 80s, this is really quite the thing – even if what they come to be replaced by might be even worse.

It is becoming more and more up for question, though, whether Reform are replacing the Tories at all, or merely reinventing them under a new name. There are two elements to this. First, as Reform realises it might have to govern soon, it is walking back some of the more batshit elements of its programme (though many remain!), and at least attempting to talk the talk of administrative competence. It is moving closer in several respects, that is, to a more conventional Tory position, even as the Tories lurch to the right. Second, recall that one of Reform’s major structural problems is a lack of would-be MPs and ministers who are in any way competent. The people who have been elected as local councillors have made them a continual laughing-stock.

To some extent this hole is being plugged by constant defections of former Tory ministers (no, I’m not claiming these people are competent! But they are trumpeted, at least, as showing the party has experience and gravitas). But every former Tory minister who joins (today it was Nadeem Zahawi, tomorrow who knows?) raises the question of whether Reform are killing the Tories, or saving them by giving them a new flag to wrap themselves in. Would a Reform government be, in personnel and to some degree in platform, that distinguishable from the kind of Tory government Truss might have led if she hadn’t gone down in flames so quickly?

This also prompts questions about whether the continual defections of prominent Tories to the party might, at some point, be noticed by some of their prospective voters. Reform holds together a fractious coalition of voters, many of whom do not consider themselves Conservatives and might indeed hate the Conservatives (it is, remember, a protest party above all, and protest parties are not meant to be fond of people who have until recently spent years in government). As more and more Tory grandees join the ranks, might the coalition start to fracture?

I’ve been asked by a couple of friends, who have signed contracts to write nonfiction trade books, whether I have any advice on how to make sure the book gets written. I think in general non-fiction trade writing is quite a different challenge from academic writing, which I discussed here in 2022, when I was working on Limitarianism. But how does one actually make sure the writing gets done, especially if one has a job (academic or otherwise) that already consumes more than 40 hours a week and is prone to procrastination?

Here are some lessons I learnt while working on my book from the Fall of 2022 till the Summer of 2023.

First, yes, one needs dedicated time set apart. I was on leave when I wrote my book (which, under the Dutch system, is actually just holidays one has saved up for many years, but that’s a discussion for another day). I cannot imagine how I would have written the book otherwise, in such a short timeframe. To make things worse, the interest of publishers was so great (with the translation rights for half a dozen languages already sold before I started to work on the book full-time), that I felt daunted. And then, for the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. I was scared I had entered a world (–it’s an industry, really–) where I wasn’t sure I could deliver, and I was freezing. [click to continue…]

In political epistemology, there is a lot of criticism of the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas,” the thought that people somehow “trade” in arguments or ideas and thereby arrive at true beliefs.* The longer you think about it, the less sense it makes. Ideas come in networks, not as separately tradeable items; “trading” suggests that you don’t have any deep connection to the ideas in question, and if people follow the profit motive, or look for entertainment, rather than search for truth, why expect that somehow, truth would mysteriously result from the process?

But what, then, would be a better metaphor for thinking about processes in which people change their minds, coming to accept new views or arguments? Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphor of moving – in the sense of changing residence, relocating. The verb functions most beautifully (of the languages I know) in Dutch, where verhuizen means something like “re-housing;” French is similar with déménager, where ménage is the household. In my native German, you us the same word, umziehen, as for changing clothes – strange enough once you start thinking about it…

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