When Reason goes on Holliday

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about the brightest minds and their dumbest opinions. It goes into detail about modern philosophers, and their political opinions, who sometimes show how brilliant minds fall for the simplest falsehoods. It is a warning that knowledge is not always transferable.

🎨 Impressions

It is an okay book, I felt it was a simple and easy read. Sometimes, it became a bit stale. It is common knowledge that a lot of people in academia are very left-leaning, and a whole lotta people fell for the Marxist-Leninist spell of soixante-huitard. It is a warning sign that people can fall for insanely dumb takes.

A case of note is maybe Einstein and Godel, who had some horrid takes on freedom in the US. But remember Godel, who in spite of being one of the most brilliant logicians ever, where a deeply troubled man, who had fits of depression. We should not judge their bad takes too harshly.

I became more interested in how extremely significant 1968 was in the academic context. Also, I became a bit more forgiving of some of the people mentioned in the text.

✍️ My Top Quotes

“It is curious that the greatest intellectual gifts sometimes carry with them the inability to perceive simple realities that would be obvious to a moron.” —E. T. JAYNES
“Many would be wise if they did not think themselves wise.” —BALTASAR GRACIÁN
LSE was later ridiculed and referred to as the “Libyan School of Economics” and “the London School of Useful Idiots”
“Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.” —ROBERT CONQUEST
An even better response to Carnap is what Albert Camus said in Stockholm in 1957 after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature: “I think that peace is the greatest possession, but not worth entering servitude to protect”
This is what Einstein had to say in 1929, on the fifth anniversary of Lenin’s death: “In Lenin I admire a man who has thrown all his energy into making social justice real, at the sacrifice of his own person. I do not consider his method practicable. But one thing is sure: Men like him are the guardians and reformers of the conscience of mankind”
Many reacted by circulating the following macabre joke: “Now the Kremlin has acted to solve the meat shortage by slaughtering forty-eight professors”
“The white dove is a symbol of peace. No one can object to that. But if the dove suddenly appears in red plumage, there is reason to be suspicious.”
McCarthy actually did a huge service to the American left: “McCarthy was a great and long-lasting gift to the American left. He allowed apologists for Stalin’s murderous regime to present themselves as innocent victims of Main Street’s prejudices. Even more important in the long run, McCarthyism meant that America’s Communists were never required to explain themselves. This would become a matter of considerable import when a so-called New Left emerged in the 1960s”
“What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”
When Elie Wiesel read about the death of Éva Izsák, his comment was: “Jews killing Jews! In the midst of the Holocaust! I have never heard of anything like that!”
Marxism in the Soviet Union “has fallen to such a low point that it has become a joke, an object of contempt . . . and that no serious person, not even university and high-school students, can talk about Marxism without a smile or a sneer”
“The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction. After the Lost Weekend in Utopia the temptation is strong to have just one last drop, even if watered down and sold under a different label.” —ARTHUR KOESTLER
Again, one may understand that Cohen wanted the Soviet Union to continue to exist so that he and other leftist intellectuals in the West could keep thinking about socialism while maintaining a foothold in the real world.
“When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.” —LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
One cannot publish much if one believes that the most important truths are contained in a Little Red Book.
Many outsiders did not realize that a lot of the “teachers of the people” whose sudden deaths during the Cultural Revolution were officially certified as natural and many Communist cadres who were later declared dead due to illness or declared missing by the Red Guards actually died under torture.
Norbert Wiener’s announcement that he would no longer work for the U.S. Department of Defense. Wiener explained his decision by saying: “I don’t give four-year-olds razor blades”
What the statement “I am no longer a Maoist” really says is “I am no longer a supporter of the biggest mass murderer in human history.”
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” —GEORGE ORWELL
The record holder, however, is probably Michael Quill (head of the Transport Workers Union in New York), who “is reputed to have changed his line in the middle of a speech when somebody handed him a notice saying that the Soviet Union had been invaded, and he’s supposed to have changed his line from calling it an imperialist war to calling it a war of liberation”
It was hard to miss Solzhenitsyn’s mention of Angela Davis in his famous talk at Harvard in July 1975. He also mentioned the Czech dissidents’ appealing to Davis for support and her response that “they deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” Solzhenitsyn commented: “That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you”
When intellectuals try to outmaneuver dictators they usually only manage to make fools of themselves.
“Women in Philosophy: Problems with the Discrimination Hypothesis” (Sesardić & De Clercq 2014). We argue there that although many philosophers and philosophical associations claim that women are underrepresented in philosophy largely due to discrimination, the evidence for this accusation crumbles under examination.
“Philosophy departments almost without exception boycott Ayn Rand’s disciples.”
One of many examples is the following statement of Ulrike Meinhof, the well-known German terrorist and cofounder of the Red Army Faction (RAF): Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were considered: money-Jews. Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews . . . Antisemitism is really a hatred of capitalism”
According to studies of the political attitudes of American professors at the time, the proportion of the professors’ vote for the far-left candidates (including Cleaver) in the 1968 presidential election was about ten times higher than in the general population
Other hand, saying that someone “deserves X” usually means that one is worthy of X by virtue of some action or personal characteristic. Obviously these are two very different things. And there is simply no way one can validly infer that one is not entitled to X from the mere fact that one does not deserve X. For example, if I win a million dollars in a lottery or if I inherit this amount from my rich parents, arguably I do not deserve this money (for I did nothing to really earn it) but this by no means proves that I am not entitled to it (i.e., that I don’t have a moral right to keep it).
To recapitulate: Parfit’s statement (2) says something very radical and very controversial, namely that rich people don’t have a moral right to keep their wealth. But why should we accept (2)? Parfit apparently tries to support it by adding statement (3), that the rich do not deserve their wealth,6 presumably because their wealth (especially compared to the poverty of those in Africa) is largely due to their pure luck of having been born in environments full of opportunities. The problem with Parfit’s logic is twofold. First, he provides no real evidence (let alone compelling evidence) for the sweeping assertion (3), and second, even if he did, (2) would still not follow. Another question: If Parfit genuinely believed that he had stolen his house, car, money, etc., from others, isn’t it clear that he wouldn’t continue to hold on to all those things? He is obviously not the kind of person who would keep something he himself regarded literally as stolen. Hence the very fact that he has been unable to renounce his possessions indicates that in his heart of hearts he does not truly believe that he stole them. If Parfit did believe this, though, it would have been extremely easy for him to restore justice in his own case. For after having publicly announced that he wouldn’t stop the poor if they came to his place to remove his property, the only thing that remained for him to do in order to facilitate a quick and rightful restitution was to disclose to the world the address of his Oxford residence. Which he has not done. Notice, however, that Parfit is not talking only about Parfit. He is talking about all well-to-do people in the West. Consequently the import of his statement is far-reaching. His view implies that if millions of sub-Saharan Africans came to the United States, Canada, Australia, England, France, Germany, and Italy, not only would they have a moral right to remove property from rich and well-off households in those countries, the local people would have a moral duty to invite these newcomers into their homes and ask them to take away all the stuff that the current “owners” had stolen from the needy. Such a radical approach to economic redistribution is almost unheard of. In terms of ordinary political taxonomy, it is best classified as belonging to the extreme fringe of the extreme left. To
The philosopher F. H. Bradley famously defined metaphysics as the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
“Have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
When John Silber, former president of Boston University, was asked whether people in the position of making politically sensitive changes in higher education are scared of taking measures in this direction, he responded: “Many are. But ask why. They’re not going to be shot at or put in prison. They’re probably not going to be fined. They’re not going to lose their jobs. Why does it take courage when there is no risk?”