Aeon: Rich witches

When investigating witchcraft, one needs to differentiate between real and imaginary magic in the early modern period. If we want to understand the connection between the imaginary magic of the witches and economic behaviour, we need to deal with the connection between the economy and the real magic practised by ‘common’ people. In pre-industrial Europe, magic was a part of everyday life, very much like religion. People didn’t just believe in the efficacy of magic, they actively tried to use magic themselves. Simple forms of divination and healing magic were common, as was magic related to agriculture. The peasant household used divination to find out if the time was right for certain agricultural activities. Charms were supposed to keep the livestock in good health. Urban artisans and merchants also used economic magic to increase their wealth. Of course, the shadow economy of gambling and lotteries was obsessed with magic well into the 20th century. [...]

It was quite clear where the dragon got the goods, and our sources emphasise this point: everything the dragon brought its master had been stolen from somebody else. Dragon magic was about magical theft. Indeed, the dragon seems to be an embodiment of transfer magic, that is, any kind of magic that takes some good, including fertility or energy itself, out of one context and transfers it into another context. The milk witch who conveys the milk from her neighbours’ cows to her own livestock, or the vampire that takes life energy itself away from others would be good examples of transfer magic. And the dragon delivered not only various kinds of produce. It brought money. The very idea of the dragon had adapted to the rising market economy. [...]

Now, we can put the dragon magic into the wider context of treasure hunters and rich witches. The treasure hunters alone really tried to use magic, but they weren’t accused of witchcraft. Rich witches and dragon witches don’t seem to have really used any magic, but they were certainly rumoured to have a pact with the devil. The dragon witches were said to owe their wealth to magical theft perpetrated for them by a demon in the shape of a dragon. The demonic figure of the dragon and the magical thievery associated with it establish a direct connection between economic advancement and suspicions of magic. The rich witches are much more difficult to understand. They were not said to have become rich because of their magic. Their wealth as such provoked rumours of witchcraft.

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Aeon: Who counts as a victim?

Jackson’s approach proved to be fatally prophetic. Ever since, governments of most stripes countenance inflicting enemy civilian casualties rather than endangering their military forces. Bombing enemies into submission – conceived as entire societies – has been the preferred means, from the US flattening of North Korea in the early 1950s, and later in Vietnam, and the Russian shelling of Grozny, Chechnya, in the 1990s, to the serial Israeli attacks on Gaza, the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of Aleppo and other localities, and the Saudi-led destruction of Yemen. While more accurate than shelling and saturation bombing, continuous US drone strikes also causes civilian deaths. Together, these actions have killed millions. Trumping them all is the largest post-Second World War civilian casualty case: the some 45 million ordinary Chinese who perished in the Great Leap Forward famine between 1958 and 1962. But who remembers these people and their suffering besides their families and some academics? They’re excluded from the contemporary image of authentic victimhood because they aren’t victims of genocide.[...]

Second, Allied bombing killed almost a million German and Japanese civilians: again, enemy civilians couldn’t be iconic victims. Although Germans and Japanese militaries had started the practice of bombing undefended cities, the Allies perfected it. This is why, at Nuremberg, Germans weren’t indicted for their aerial bombing campaigns. [...]

The image of the largely agentless and innocent Jewish victim represents the ‘ideal’ victim: that socially constructed status by which sympathy and legitimacy are conferred on certain objects of violence and not on others. Because of the Holocaust memory’s omnipresence, its Jewish victims represent the archetypal and universal form of this status. This status becomes what the writer Alex Cocotas in 2017 called a ‘sacred altar’ that ‘foster[s] identification with victimhood’, even though – or perhaps because – most people are likely to be perpetrators rather than victims because they aren’t members of minorities.

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Aeon: Sex is real

There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When we look across the diversity of life, sex takes stranger forms than anyone has dreamt of for humans. The biological definition of sex takes all this in its stride. It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. To many people, that might seem to have ‘conservative’ implications, or to fly in the face of the diversity we see in actual human beings. I will make clear why it does not. [...]

Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.

While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. Gender theorists have extensively criticised the chromosomal definition of human sexes. But however well or badly that definition works for humans, it’s an abject failure when you look at sex across the diversity of life. [...]

Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. Consider the sex-switching species described above: what sex are they when they’re halfway through switching? What sex are they if something goes wrong, perhaps due to hormone-mimicking chemicals from decaying plastic waste? Once we see the development of sex as a process – and one that can be disrupted – it is inevitable that there will be many individual organisms that aren’t clearly of either sex. But that doesn’t mean that there are many biological sexes, or that biological sex is a continuum. There remain just two, distinct ways in which organisms contribute genetic material to their offspring.

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Aeon: Confidence tricks

 This means that, when making decisions that require expert perspective, it might be a mark of a true expert to admit that he or she doesn’t know, at least not yet. And, if we aren’t sure what questions are answerable, we are vulnerable to uninformed experts convincing us they have the answers. Even worse, good experts, when posed an unanswerable question, might do the same. From the expert perspective, they know that admitting uncertainty can harm their reputation, because bad experts are more likely to be uninformed than good ones. More concretely, saying ‘I don’t know’ makes for bad punditry, and unenviable terrain for ambitious analysts or consultants hoping to justify their hourly rate. [...]

Bad policy can also come about when the research frontier doesn’t offer definitive answers, or gives the wrong answers. The history of medicine is littered with examples of treatments that we now know did more harm than good, such as bloodletting, tobacco and opium. All of these techniques had ‘evidence’ that they were in fact healthy, from vague theories about ‘humours’ (bloodletting) to real evidence that they reduced pain, but without sufficient consideration of side effects (opium). Many lives would have been saved if doctors realised that they didn’t know whether these treatments worked well enough to outweigh the side-effects, and were able to admit this. [...]

What can we do about this problem? A seemingly obvious solution would be to check whether expert claims are correct. If experts who make strong claims that are then refuted are chastised and not hired in the future, this might deter them from overclaiming. Alas, the punishment for guessing wrong never seems to be that high: the architects of the Iraq War and those responsible for decisions that led to the 2008 financial crises are generally doing quite well, professionally. And our model gives a theoretical justification for why. Just as some experts who don’t have a good answer to questions really are competent but face an unanswerable question, those who guess and end up being incorrect might be competent too. In fact, if all uninformed experts guess at the truth, then guessing and being wrong is no worse than just admitting uncertainty outright. So the uninformed might as well roll the dice and guess: if they are right, they look competent; if not, they look no worse than if they had been honest about their uncertainty.

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Aeon: The semi-satisfied life

 Schopenhauer’s pessimism is based on two kinds of observation. The first is an inward-looking observation that we aren’t simply rational beings who seek to know and understand the world, but also desiring beings who strive to obtain things from the world. Behind every striving is a painful lack of something, Schopenhauer claims, yet obtaining this thing rarely makes us happy. For, even if we do manage to satisfy one desire, there are always several more unsatisfied ones ready to take its place. Or else we become bored, aware that a life with nothing to desire is dull and empty. If we are lucky enough to satisfy our basic needs, such as hunger and thirst, then in order to escape boredom we develop new needs for luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco or fashionable clothing. At no point, Schopenhauer says, do we arrive at final and lasting satisfaction. Hence one of his well-known lines: ‘life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom’. [...]

The second kind of observation is outward-looking. According to Schopenhauer, a glance at the world around us disproves the defining thesis of Gottfried Leibniz’s optimism that ours is the best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, Schopenhauer claims, if our world is ordered in any way, it is ordered to maximise pain and suffering. He gives the example of predatory animals that cannot but devour other animals in order to survive and so become ‘the living grave of thousands of others’. Nature as a whole is ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson later put it, pitting one creature against another, either as the devourer or the devoured, in a deadly fight for survival. [...]

None of this is to say that no one ever feels happy. Again, this would fly in the face of the personal experience of countless people who have felt happy at some point in their lives. It does tell us, however, that happiness differs from pain and suffering in the way that it’s felt. Pain and suffering announce themselves whether we like it or not. They highlight that something is wrong and needs fixing. However small and trivial the problem might be, pain and suffering will make it our number-one priority. Happy feelings, on the other hand, don’t always announce themselves. We can have all the things that should make us feel happy and yet fail to feel happy. It could be because pain and suffering are tirelessly flagging up things not to feel happy about, but it could just be that – like the mouthful of food after it’s swallowed – we have forgotten all the things that are doing us good. [...]

The last thing we should do is believe the opposite: that we are destined to find happiness in life rather than encounter suffering. If we believe the world owes us happiness, we are bound to be sorely disappointed, not least because, when we do achieve whatever we think will make us happy, we will have new unfulfilled desires that will supersede the old ones. We are also bound to feel resentment towards the obstacles that stand between us and the happiness we feel entitled to. Some people, Schopenhauer observes, concentrate and externalise this resentment by setting a goal for a happy life that on some level they know is unachievable. Then, when it never materialises, they always have something other than themselves to point to and blame for why they aren’t happy. ‘In this respect,’ Schopenhauer says, ‘the external motive for sadness plays the same role that a blister remedy does on the body, drawing together all the bad humours that would have otherwise been scattered.’

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Aeon: Nostalgia reimagined

With these clarifications in mind, let’s re-evaluate the tripartite view of nostalgia, beginning with its cognitive component. According to this view, nostalgia involves autobiographical memories of one’s homeland, suggesting that the object of one’s nostalgic states must be a place. However, research shows that by ‘homeland’ people often mean something else: childhood experiences, long-gone friends, foods, costumes, etc. Indeed, the multifarious nature of nostalgia’s objects was first systematically studied in 1995 by the American psychologist Krystine Batcho. She documented 648 participants’ nostalgic events, and found that, while they often reported feeling nostalgic about places, they also felt so about nonspatial items: loved ones, the feeling of ‘not having to worry’, holidays, or simply ‘the way people were’. Similarly, in 2006, the psychologist Tim Wildschut and his colleagues at the University of Southampton coded the content of 42 autobiographical narratives from Nostalgia magazine, as well as dozens of narratives from undergraduates, and found that a large proportion were about things other than locations. This variability holds across cultures too, as evidenced by the work of Erica Hepper and her international team who in 2014 studied 1,704 students from 18 countries and found that they frequently experienced nostalgia about things other than past events or places, including social relationships, memorabilia or childhood. These results suggest that mental states associated with nostalgia needn’t be memories of specific locations nor of specific autobiographical events. [...]

Although memory and imagination are usually thought of as different, a number of critical findings in the past three decades have challenged this view. In 1985, the psychologist Endel Tulving in Toronto observed that his amnesic patient ‘N N’ not only had difficulty remembering his past: he also had trouble imagining possible future events. This led Tulving to suggest that remembering the past and imagining the future were two processes of a single system for mental time-travel. Further support for this hypothesis came in the early 2000s, as a number of scientific studies confirmed that both remembering the past and imagining the future engage the brain’s so-called ‘default network’. But in the past decade, it has become clear that the brain’s default network supports mental simulations of other hypothetical events too, such as episodes that could have occurred in one’s past but didn’t, atemporal routine activities (eg, brushing teeth), mind-wandering, spatial navigation, imagining other people’s thoughts (mentalising) and narrative comprehension, among others. As a result, researchers now think that what unifies this common neural network isn’t just mental time-travel, but rather a more general kind of psychological process characterised by being self-relevant, socially significant and episodically, dynamically imaginative. My suggestion is that the kinds of nonautobiographical cognitive contents associated with nostalgic states are instances of this broader category of imaginations. [...]

But what about all these negatively valenced symptoms – the sadness, the depression – associated with nostalgia? Aren’t they also effects of nostalgia? My sense is that physicians of old got the order of causation backwards: nostalgia doesn’t cause negative affect but, rather, is caused by negative affect. Evidence for this claim comes from a number of recent studies showing that people are more likely to feel nostalgia when they are experiencing negative affect. Specifically, it has been documented that certain negative experiences tend to trigger nostalgia, including loneliness, loss of social connections, sense of meaninglessness, boredom, even cold temperatures. This doesn’t mean that nostalgia is triggered only by negative experiences, but it does suggest that the negative affect can often be a cause, rather than an effect, of nostalgia. [...]

A more tractable version of this second reading was championed by Charles Zwingmann’s medical analysis of nostalgia in 1960, according to which what the subject wants is for gratifying features from past experiences to be reinstated in the present, presumably because the current situation lacks them. Although a person might feel nostalgia about a childhood friendship, her longing would actually be satisfied not by travelling back in time but by improving her current relationships. There are two advantages to this approach. First, it helps to understand nostalgia’s particular instantiation of Gorgias’ paradox: the nostalgic individual wrongly attributes the desirable features of the object to an unrecoverable event, when in reality those features can be dissociated from it and reattached to a current condition. Second, this approach can help to understand recent findings suggesting that nostalgia can be motivational, and can increase optimism, creativity and pro-social behaviours.

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Aeon: The necessity of awe

When a scientific paradigm breaks down, scientists need to make a leap into the unknown. These are moments of revolution, as identified by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, when the scientists’ worldview becomes untenable and the agreed-upon and accepted truths of a particular discipline are radically called into question. Beloved theories are revealed to have been built upon sand. Explanations that held up for hundreds of years are now dismissed. A particular and productive way of looking at the world turns out to be erroneous in its essentials. The great scientific revolutions – such as those instigated by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein and Wegener – are times of great uncertainty, when cool, disinterested reason alone doesn’t help scientists move forward because so many of their usual assumptions about how their scientific discipline is done turn out to be flawed. So they need to make a leap, not knowing where they will land. But how? [...]

The need for cognitive accommodation makes you aware that there is a lot you don’t know. You feel small, insignificant and part of something bigger. In this way, awe is a self-transcendent emotion because it focuses our attention away from ourselves and toward our environment. It is also an epistemic emotion, because it makes us aware of gaps in our knowledge. We can feel overwhelmed looking at the night sky, deeply aware that there is so much we don’t know about the Universe. In one recent study, participants listed nature as their most common elicitor of awe, followed by scientific theories, works of art and the achievements of human cooperation. [...]

Empirical evidence suggests that awe plays a role in the appreciation of science. These studies provide a tentative glimpse of how awe and science relate, even though they focus on laypeople, and not (yet) on scientists themselves. Writing in 2018, the psychologists Keltner, Sara Gottlieb and Tania Lombrozo found that the tendency to feel awe (dispositional awe) is positively associated with scientific thinking in non-scientists. Participants with higher dispositional awe have a comparably better grasp on the nature of science, are more likely to reject Young Earth creationism, and also are more likely to reject unwarranted teleological explanations for natural phenomena. When awe is induced, people feel more positive toward science. One recent study showed participants a movie montage of the BBC TV series Planet Earth, containing sweeping vistas of waterfalls, canyons, forests and other awe-inducing views. Participants in a control condition watched humorous videos of cute animals engaged in capers and antics. Those who saw the awe-inspiring videos were more aware of gaps in their knowledge than those who saw the funny videos.

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Aeon: Why won’t the sin wash away? When thinking ethically goes awry

What does this look like in practice? A person with scrupulosity could spend hours a day praying, worrying that he must get his prayers exactly right or his family could be hurt. He wonders with each prayer if he had the right intention or whether some sinful impulse had crept in, so he repeats until it feels right. Or a person worries that a stray comment to a stranger might have led that person to sin, so she spends days tracking down that person to clarify her innocuous comment. Or a person insists on greeting everyone she sees in order to ‘love thy neighbour’, circling back to catch people she missed. Or a person checks and rechecks receipts to make sure he didn’t inadvertently steal from a business by underpaying.

Those with scrupulosity might realise that their actions are atypical – but it’s also atypical to act morally in a morally mediocre world. People who give 20 per cent of their income to charity act atypically too, but that doesn’t make their action an indication of a disorder. So recognising that the actions are atypical is compatible with thinking that these are the actions that morality requires. And their chronic doubt about their actions is also compatible with moral judgments: saints often wonder if they are sinners, and philosophers professionally doubt even the most obvious. [...]

What the person with scrupulosity overlooks is that morality makes multiple demands on us simultaneously. A genuine moral judgment has to consider more than just a single issue at a time. A waiter can give a narrow justification as to why, if all else is equal, he ought to doublecheck that no solvents from the storeroom inadvertently ended up in the food he is serving. But all else is not equal: it was all but impossible for the solvents to end up in the food, and the time spent checking the storeroom is time he could have spent doing other things with some real moral value, such as having a conversation with a lonely diner or helping a parent wrangle kids to the table.

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Aeon: Love shouldn’t be blind or mad. Instead, fall rationally in love

As the title of the memoir makes plain, Steiner’s love is deeply irrational, verging on madness. Victims of domestic violence sometimes stay with their abuser out of fear of repercussions and backlash if they leave. This makes sense. But Steiner didn’t stay out of fear. Not initially, at least. When Conor broke a glass frame over her head, slitting open her face, her only thoughts were: ‘Don’t let this happen. I do still love him. He is my family.’ Staying with your abuser out of love, as Steiner did, is irrational because it vitiates prudential – or ‘self-regarding’ – concerns, which are the hallmark of practical rationaling.

As I have argued in my book On Romantic Love (2015), rational love – love that is sane, sound and sensible – is reason-responsive, grounded in reality and consonant with your overall mindset. These are lofty ideals but not unachievable goals. For love to be reason-responsive it must yield to reasons against it – reasons that your love is inimical to your interests. Your interests are those states of affairs that further your overall flourishing, or wellbeing. Performing an unpleasant activity might be in your best interest if it promotes your overall wellbeing. Think pelvic exams, colonoscopies and root canals – or breaking up with someone you are madly in love with. Despite knowing that Conor presented a threat to her safety and wellbeing, Steiner didn’t get out until she had suffered four years of domestic abuse. Instead, she rationalised the beatings and hid her bruises. Her love was immune to reason. [...]

To be consonant with your overall mindset, love must cohere with your beliefs, desires and emotions and not breed internal inconsistency. The love part of love-hate relationships is a paradigm example of love that vitiates this ideal. To love someone is to have a strong desire to promote their interests. But when you hate someone, you don’t want to promote their interests, and probably want to impede them. Simultaneously loving and hating someone thus breeds internal inconsistency, or what is also known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. It’s a kind of defence mechanism, where you often suppress your hatred to avoid the uncomfortable realisation that your relationship is dysfunctional. During her four-year relationship with Conor, Steiner’s rationalisations of his egregious behaviour become increasingly riven with internal contradictions and efforts to suppress her own anger and hatred.

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Aeon: Gentileschi. Let us not allow sexual violence to define the artist

But ever since Gentileschi made it out of art-historical obscurity in the early 20th century, her work has never moved beyond Tassi’s shadow. Early reappraisals qualified her artistic abilities with references to her ‘lascivious’ and ‘precocious’ manner. The American art historian Linda Nochlin cited the case of Gentileschi in her epochal essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) to call for a ‘dispassionate, impersonal, sociological’ art history. Yet just three years later, fellow scholar Eleanor Tufts cast Gentileschi as a kind of sex-positive icon – one who, despite the trauma of her ‘introduction to the ways of love and desire’, had numerous affairs and ‘was, not surprisingly, a superb writer of love letters’. [...]

In the present moment, the confluence of commodified feminism and the #MeToo movement has produced a surge of interest in Gentileschi and in biographical interpretation of her work. With eyes on her images of violated or vengeful women, Gentileschi has become a Baroque #MeToo heroine who turned the horrors of her life into brutal painting, according to The Guardian. When one of Gentileschi’s depictions of Lucretia – a Roman noblewoman who stabbed herself in the heart after she was raped – went to auction in Paris in 2019, pre-sale publicity leaned heavily on its ‘autobiographical’ content. ‘The story of Artemisia is just like that story,’ said the auction-house specialist, ‘except that Artemisia decided on another outcome for her life.’ [...]

For Gentileschi, yet another double standard enters the picture: the readiness to separate life and art for an aggressor, against the eagerness to conflate life and art for a victim. Eric Gill; Roman Polanski; Pablo ‘each time I leave a woman, I should burn her’ Picasso. So much transcendence granted to the man-made artwork, lifted high above the abuse, however flagrant. When in 2017 Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in East Sussex mounted an exhibition addressing Gill’s sexual abuse of his teenage daughters, the critic Rachel Cooke in The Observer wondered why this information was forced on visitors. By contrast, Gentileschi’s biography is frequently ‘forced upon’ both her work and its viewers – a process that allows sadistic relish to masquerade as gender-progressive concern, and objectifies the artist rather than recognising her immense ability.

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Aeon: Money and modern life

Time is no longer governed by the seasons or celestial bodies, but is abstracted and measured. The city also compresses space, social and geographical. Diverse classes, strata, cultures, linguistic groups and vocations are brought into close proximity. This is why, as Simmel observed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche preached against the city bitterly: it threatened to subsume his noble individualism into a mass.

While Simmel was a deep reader of Nietzsche and shared his romantic attraction to ‘an endless succession of contrasts’, he took an urbane distance from the latter’s aristocratic radicalism. Instead of seeking extremes in the mountains of Sils Maria, Simmel found them in the metropolitan crowd, where one can feel the uniquely modern loneliness of passing a thousand faces without recognising a friend. Nietzsche’s peaks and valleys produced noble heights and abject depths. Simmel’s metropolis instead cultivated blasé citizens who, afraid of being subsumed, distinguish themselves with externally cool indifference. [...]

Instead, he concluded that ‘truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it’. Simmel saw that the individual’s quest for truth would inevitably fail, revealing itself to be as perniciously circular as the movement of money. Thus, relativism – a doctrine of constant flux – was to be the only viable absolute. Simmel presented this as liberating: ‘the expropriator will now be expropriated, as Marx says of a process that is similar in form – and nothing remains but the relativistic dissolution of things into relations and processes.’ But there is also an element of tragedy here: to love truth is to love something we feel duty-bound to seek, even though it remains always out of reach. Like Herman Hesse’s protagonist in Steppenwolf (1927), Simmel chased an elusive absolute.

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Aeon: Vice dressed as virtue

On the face of it, cruelty and morality are opposites. Just as morality stands as a check or constraint on our cruel impulses, so these impulses propel us away from morality. On closer examination, however, the relationship between them is more complex and much messier. One way of appreciating this is to consider our retributive propensities and dispositions, which certainly encourage causing pain and suffering to those we find objectionable or threatening. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to consider the relationship between morality and cruelty entirely in terms of our largescale social and legal institutions and practices, such as prisons, and the forms of punishment associated with them. For one thing, these institutions and practices might or might not be cruel in terms of the definition provided. Beyond this, we shouldn’t overlook or ignore the way in which morality is frequently misused at a much more personal or everyday level, one that need not involve our legal institutions and practices at all. The particular form of cruelty that I am concerned with is a mode of moralism. [...]

The particular motivations behind vain moralism largely account for the cluster of vices associated with it. This includes hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, pomposity, pretension and conformism. These vices are all evidence that vain moralism is at work. Cruel moralism involves a very different set of motivations and a different cluster of vices. Although vain moralisers might adopt cruel attitudes and practices if they serve their (vain and shallow) ends, there is no satisfaction or pleasure taken in the suffering and humiliation of others for its own sake. With cruel moralism, things are different. What gives cruel moralisers satisfaction is not enhancing their moral standing in the eyes of others but rather the suffering and humiliation of others as a means to achieve power and domination over them. Achieving this confirms the moralisers’ sense of superiority over others and provides further validation for their ideals and values. It is self-validation – not validation to others – that cruel moralisers care about and seek to confirm. Imposing suffering and humiliation on the guilty and morally flawed provides this validation, and this becomes a deep source of motivation in their own ethical conduct and responses. In the hands of the cruel moraliser, morality lends itself to misrepresentation and misuse, and is liable to become cruel and sadistic. [...]

One reason for not relying entirely on examples of this kind is that it’s a mistake to think that cruel moralism operates only at the level of largescale or world-historical events. On the contrary, cruel moralism typically manifests itself in countless minor everyday interpersonal exchanges that pass largely unnoticed by all but those directly involved. They are, nevertheless, cruel and morally damaging. Another, more important reason for avoiding examples of the sort mentioned above is that they confuse and conflate a number of distinct issues. In the cases cited, the principles, values and ideology of the moralisers (ie, the Church, the Party, the state, etc) are all highly questionable. Beyond that, the process and procedure by which ‘guilt’ is determined is no less suspect and flawed. We are, in almost all these cases, left with the thought that the accused is entirely innocent from any relevant ethical point of view (they might, indeed, be ethical, admirable and brave figures who are simply subject to groundless persecution). In these circumstances, the victims of moral cruelty know that neither those who condemn them, nor what they are being condemned for, have the slightest moral standing or credibility – however cruel they might still be. [...]

This disposition to moral idealism and utopian goals is itself closely allied with a Manichean world view that divides the moral community into the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty, victims and oppressors, exploited and exploiters, friends and enemies, saints and sinners, and so on. This becomes another dynamic for cruel moralism. Moral practitioners who live in a world that is ethically polarised in this way are especially vulnerable to the satisfactions of cruel moralism. A world governed by such simple and crude moral divisions and polarities is one where it becomes easy to lose all sympathetic feeling and affinity for those who fall on the wrong side of the divide. Whatever restraints and moderation might be encouraged by kinder motivations will be lost, and the pleasures of watching the wicked suffer will be amplified. In many religions, this becomes part of an ‘inspiring’ picture of our moral future – a form of moral sickness that has worked its way deeply into those political ideologies that developed out of them (including ideologies that claim to have repudiated their own religious sources and origins).

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Aeon: The fruits of anger

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits. Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology. Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding. It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation. Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault. Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless. Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’ It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings. [...]

The philosopher Maxime Lepoutre at Nuffield College in Oxford argues that anger – as expressed through speech or nonverbal cues – can direct attention to the most morally pressing features of particular situations. For instance, victims of domestic abuse, through spontaneous anger, articulate publicly the extent of violation and pain they experience at the hands of their abusers. Thunberg’s angry speech reminds us of the extent to which we are actively, presently complicit in the persistence of climate change. Communicative anger helps us understand what is at stake, and what is most important to those with whom we are speaking.

Anger can motivate people, too. Malcolm X’s anger found voice in his call for violent self-defence and active resistance towards both the institutionally racist police force and the tacitly racist American middle class. His advocacy epitomised a willingness to subvert established legal structures and social norms in advancement of African American interest. Anger mixed with symbolic or psychological violence – as opposed to the non-violent, non-confrontational methodology for which Martin Luther King became known – was the driving force behind those who found King’s methods too conciliatory and inefficacious. Regardless of how one assesses the moral legitimacy of Malcolm X’s methods, his radical activism reshaped public discourse, rendering King’s advocacy not only more palatable, but even honourable in the eyes of the fundamentally shaken American public. As Srinivasan notes: ‘It is historically naive, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.’ [...]

Anger is an overriding emotion – it is, by its vindictive and impulsive nature, uncontrollable and blinding. It wages war against cool and steady consideration of all reasons in decisionmaking, by amplifying disproportionately our thirst for what we take to be justice. At its worst, anger is what propels terrorist ideology and mass violence, committed by psychopathic individuals to exact revenge and attain justice under their ideological conceptions. More mundanely, anger causes us to shut out dissent and take pleasure in inflicting pain upon others – it transforms others’ suffering into something we take to be right and warranted. We can be easily skewed by our biases and pre-existing views to project our anger on to the wrong individuals, thereby undermining our ability to act upon our considered judgments.

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Aeon: We are nature

For decades, Lovelock has warned of the global heating that will permanently alter human and nonhuman ways of life. His recent publications reveal an understanding, shared with Spinoza, that these natural transformations are profoundly amoral. Gaia strives to preserve itself, to preserve life as such: Gaia, God or nature doesn’t have any interest in preserving this or that species, or any particular configuration of the Earth. Lovelock also shares with Spinoza the understanding that human transformations of the Earth are part of nature, however much we might think of certain actions as harming or destroying nature. By seeking our own advantage and transforming our environment, human beings don’t destroy nature: we are nature, transforming itself. The effects of these activities are, from nature’s point of view, neither good nor bad. [...]

And this is to say nothing of our inability to rejoice in the loss or diminishment of species of insects, plants, animals and places that sustain our lives and give us joy. The Anthropocene produces in us feelings of sadness, longing, guilt, anger and resentment. These feelings are all the more strongly felt because we understand the climate crisis to be anthropogenic: we believe that we caused it through a series of choices, and that we might have chosen otherwise. As Spinoza says, we feel most keenly those emotions that are caused by beings we believe to be free. [...]

All sad passions, for Spinoza, are experienced as diminished power. When we fear our own power, we might feel this disempowerment to be what our power consists in. Disempowerment becomes our basis for striving, acting and thinking, generating what Friedrich Nietzsche in 1887 called ressentiment. Spinoza calls this humility, which is not virtuous self-effacement but an ‘evil and useless’ passion closely aligned to self-regard and envy. Because we naturally rejoice in our own power to act, we perversely celebrate our own weakness. Our fears and resentments become the basis of misplaced pride and arrogance. As we know, those feelings can be put to political uses: our climate fears have loomed behind campaigns for Brexit, Donald Trump and populist and neo-fascist leaders, all making strategic use of fear and resentment, and taking pride in lack of knowledge. When we fear our own power and its effects on the ground we stand on, we are easily swayed by those who promise the imagined stabilities of the land and borders of the past. [...]

We should strive to support the flourishing of other animals and natural things not out of pity or guilt or fondness, but because their flourishing is essential for our flourishing. Recall that for Spinoza, ‘good’ is what we certainly know to be useful to us: we certainly know the utility of the ice caps remaining frozen, of the Amazon remaining intact, and of bees and butterflies continuing to thrive. According to Spinoza, this certain knowledge should determine us to strive for those ends. Given that we know that the flourishing of other beings on Earth is instrumental to our own, what prevents us from striving for it? Spinoza argues that passions and inadequate ideas can derail us from affirming and acting on what we know to be good. In these cases, we need laws to make us act well: laws that are determined by a state that agrees on shared goals. Laws tell us how to act when we don’t know, or can’t remember, what is good for us.

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Aeon: It didn’t have to be this way

The document provoked an uproar. The media feasted on it, spreading the panic. The situation in Italy was certainly exceptional due to the sheer number of cases presenting themselves each day. It’s likely the first time that many of these doctors, especially the younger ones, were being faced with such harrowing choices. Yet, from an ethical point of view, the document was neither unprecedented nor revolutionary. In another context of scarce resources – organ donation – patients are routinely ranked on waiting lists using an algorithm. Standard criteria match donor organs to recipients using a calculation of the chances of the transplant’s success and the patient’s survival. More controversial criteria can apply too. For example, if someone has cirrhosis of the liver caused by drinking, their personal responsibility in causing the condition will, in some circumstances, be a factor that weighs against their receiving a transplant. [...]

There’s no such thing as a value-free model. Self-isolation and quarantine are much heavier physical and mental burdens for those who live alone. John Ioannidis, the professor of medicine at Stanford University who exposed the ‘replication crisis’ in social psychology and beyond, has argued since the beginning of the pandemic that the economic, social and mental health implications of lockdowns must be accounted for in cost-benefit public health calculations – including the deaths caused by disruption to the social fabric. We might end up looking back on coronavirus, Ioannidis said, as a ‘a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco’. There’s currently little evidence that the most aggressive measures work, and if they continue, they could end up causing more harm in the long term than riding an acute epidemic wave. However, discounting the future is a typically human bias – as health economists know well from studies of how people think about the consequences of smoking, drinking or failing to exercise. [...]

Younger generations have been asked to make huge sacrifices for older generations, with the expectation of only very limited benefits for their own health – and some big repercussions for their own physical and mental wellbeing, including the closure of universities and loss of opportunities to work. This is also the generation that will have to pay off the bulk of debts we’re now accruing to pay for government assistance packages. Beyond family ties, the moral basis for this request isn’t obvious. On the one hand, we’ve asked a lot from younger people, without really making the case for those policies. On the other hand, when younger generations make demands of older generations – for example, about climate change and the future health of the planet – older people in power seem to have a hard time accepting them. After asking younger people to do so much for the elderly during this crisis, perhaps we ought to give them something in return.

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Aeon: Imagine alien signals are detected. Here’s what happens next

Planets aren’t rare. Life is surprisingly durable. The more we’ve learned about the Universe, the more the search for extraterrestrial life has shifted from science fiction to serious scientific undertaking. So it’s worth considering how humanity would react if we learned, through some distant but unmistakable signal, that lifeforms elsewhere in the Universe were communicating with us. In this interview, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Center for SETI Research in California, discusses how first contact is more likely to be perspective-shifting than Earth-shattering.

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Aeon: How the philosophical paradox of aspiration is resolved by a new theory of self-creation

Let’s say you’ve decided to enrich yourself by learning to appreciate classical music, even though you didn’t have much previous interest in it. Such a resolution is hardly uncommon, but acting on the aspiration requires you to value an activity that you don’t yet know how to. In this video, Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, borrows from her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) to put forth a solution to this paradox centred on understanding our current and future selves as inexorably bound through the act of aspiration. Further, she argues, in resolving this paradox, we can understand ourselves as responsible for the act of self-creation – and, by extension, for our own morals and values. This video is part of the series Into the Coast, which sets out to capture philosophy as a ‘living discipline’ through interviews with leading academic philosophers.

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Aeon: An abandoned Chinese city is the backdrop for a haunting fable on capitalism

The city of Kangbashi in northern China is empty. Although its owners continue to make a profit by speculating on rising property values, the city – complete with towering apartment complexes and elaborate recreation centres – is almost completely uninhabited. As the camera explores deserted rooftops and empty streets, a narrator begins a story – a modern fable about a cathedral built of money. Written by Michael Ende, the author of the children’s book The Neverending Story, the tale describes a church full of money-worshippers, for whom ‘Money is Truth’ and ‘Truth is a Commodity’.

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Aeon: Marcus Aurelius helped me survive grief and rebuild my life

It’s a common misconception that to be a Stoic is to be in possession of a stiff upper lip, to be free from the tumultuous waves of one’s emotions. But what this interpretation of Stoicism gets wrong is that our emotions, even the most painful ones, need not be our enemies if we can learn to think of them as our guides. This might seem obviously false, or like the words of a person who has never encountered real suffering. But it was during one of the worst crises of my life that I found my way to Stoicism and, through Stoicism, to something that’s as close to acceptance as I think it’s possible to find on this plane of existence. [...]

Aurelius reminded me that where I was wasn’t just where I was but when – and that there was no advantage to be found in unsticking myself from time. I’d be lying if I said I learned to stop panicking immediately or instantly. But I learned to repeat to myself the instruction to ‘never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’ And I learned to take stock of the tools I had and how they could be used to solve the problems of the present rather than catastrophising the unknowns of the future.

But the passage that made the biggest difference – the passage I return to year after year, as deathiversaries or new milestones threaten to drown me in waves of grief – is a reminder that the narrative we construct around what happens to us is, ultimately, up to us. No matter how terrible what happened was, it is still our choice whether to understand our story as one of crippling defeat or a miraculous victory against the odds – even if all we do is get back up and learn to stand again.

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Aeon: How Europe became so rich

It should be emphasised that Europe’s success was not the result of any inherent superiority of European (much less Christian) culture. It was rather what is known as a classical emergent property, a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole. The modern European economic miracle was the result of contingent institutional outcomes. It was neither designed nor planned. But it happened, and once it began, it generated a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress that made knowledge-driven growth both possible and sustainable.

How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation. [...]

In early modern Europe, however, political and religious fragmentation did not mean small audiences for intellectual innovators. Political fragmentation existed alongside a remarkable intellectual and cultural unity. Europe offered a more or less integrated market for ideas, a continent-wide network of learned men and women, in which new ideas were distributed and circulated. European cultural unity was rooted in its classical heritage and, among intellectuals, the widespread use of Latin as their lingua franca. The structure of the medieval Christian Church also provided an element shared throughout the continent. Indeed, long before the term ‘Europe’ was commonly used, it was called ‘Christendom’.

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