The religious metaphor makes God and the Virgin the bestowers of the lottery’s miracles.
.. It was the culture of Catholicism, after all, that invented the probability calculus.
.. Playing the lottery means trying to make a connection with divine providence, giving God a chance to intervene in our lives, rejecting the narcissistic idea that success is due solely to our own efforts—in short, accepting grace over merit.
.. Even when it leads to success, merit is merciless, lonely, bleak. Luck, meanwhile, is grace unbidden, whether it heaps Job with blessings or strips him of everything.
.. The lottery is a yearning for paradise: for the age of hunters and gatherers, before agriculture and work. According to Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics, hunter-gatherer tribes (which still inhabit some parts of Australia) don’t work: they talk (while they’re out shopping in nature) and they play (while they’re hunting and fishing). To live like this is to be “another being” (as Johan Huizinga says of play)
.. Play is a simulation of need (goals, resources, rules, ambition, traps, success, or failure), happily divorced from need. It’s like the exercise of animals who attack each other but not in earnest, or who trap something they don’t need.
The Information Revolution’s Dark Turn
A Scottish philosopher visited Silicon Valley, and he didn’t like what he saw.
But I think there is a dark side there, so it did confirm some of my theorizing about the information age. There is massive inequality, which is unacceptable. Inequality should not be so great that it crystallizes into class distinctions—master-servant relations—and I think you have that in Silicon Valley, to some extent.
.. there’s also an abuse of information technology, and the threat of what I call “technocracy.” It’s a term we don’t often use now, and I mean by technocracy not the rule of experts, but the rule of information technology, the domination of information technology over human beings, and the subordination of people to a technological imperative. That is a real threat, and I think it is almost out of control.
.. For example, recent research showed that truckers were now leaving their trade because they are monitored so closely by controllers. And it’s traditionally part of the dream of truckers everywhere to have a bit more liberty, a bit more autonomy, a bit of freedom. And that’s being taken away by information technology.
.. There is a very strong anti-statism in America generally, and in particular, California, and in particular-particular, Silicon Valley. And I think it’s a mistaken philosophy.
.. I have read [Robert] Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Murray Rothbard’sEthics of Liberty, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom—I’ve read it all, and it’s a flawed philosophy. The ultimate value is not liberty: It is justice. Liberty has to fit within the context of social justice. And where it violates justice, I’m afraid justice trumps liberty.
.. I’m a follower of John Rawls, the great Harvard political philosopher, and in his Theory of Justice, he makes clear that justice is the paramount virtue in political life.
.. We also need to buy into some ancient ideals of human community and what used to be called brotherhood, but you could maybe now call fellowship or connectivity
.. As one of my informants put it, a sort of “Harvard mentality” has started to take over [fro the “Stanford mentality”]. The psychology of the playground rather than the commune is prevailing. I think there’s a mercenary element that’s stronger than used to be the case.
.. And you can see that in the way that they work their staff to death. I think that is, itself, a betrayal of human ideals. They should not be expecting people to be working 24/7/365.
.. A study came out that only 2 percent of Google’s, Yahoo’s, and a couple of other top companies’ workforces were black. Twelve percent of the U.S. population is black, so that is not good, is it?
.. the libertarian, winner-takes-all model pioneered in Silicon Valley
.. The state should be involved in helping people start companies and educating people.
The Data Against Kant: Ought vs Can
THE history of moral philosophy is a history of disagreement, but on one point there has been virtual unanimity: It would be absurd to suggest that we should do what we couldn’t possibly do.
.. In other words, we might indeed say that someone ought to do what she can’t — if we’re blaming her.
.. Even when we say that someone has no obligation to keep a promise (as with your friend whose car accidentally breaks down), it seems we’re saying it not because she’s unable to do it, but because we don’t want to unfairly blame her for not keeping it. Again, concerns about blame, not about ability, dictate how we understand obligation.
A Question of Moral Radicalism
Some radical do-gooders are what the philosopher Susan Wolf calls rational saints. It is their duty to reduce the sum total of suffering in the world, and the suffering of people halfway around the world is no different than the suffering of someone next door.
There’s a philosophy question: If you were confronted with the choice between rescuing your mother from drowning or two strangers, who should you rescue? With utilitarian logic, the rational saint would rescue the two strangers because saving two lives is better than saving one.
.. Others Wolf calls loving saints. They are good with others’ goodness, suffering in others’ pain. They are the ones holding the leper, talking to the potential suicide hour upon hour. Their service is radically personal, direct and not always pleasant.
.. To make love universal, to give no priority to the near over the far, is to denude love of its texture and warmth. It is really a way of avoiding love because you make yourself invulnerable.
.. She wrote that a world in which everybody strove to achieve moral sainthood “would probably contain less happiness than a world in which people realized a diversity of ideals involving a variety of personal and perfectionist values.”
.. As Andrew Kuper of LeapFrog Investments put it, sometimes you can do more good by buying that beautiful piece of furniture, putting somebody in Ghana to work.