Andrew Sullivan

Checking In With, You Know, Americans

As Dick Cheney urges sending ground troops into Iraq, the public is deeply opposed. (It’s worth recalling that in 2011, when president Obama withdrew all forces from Iraq, he had 75 percent support in the Gallup poll.) 42 percent of Cheney’s fellow Republicans think that Iraq is no longer America’s responsibility. A majority of Democrats and a plurality of Independents think Obama’s response has been about right. Majorities of Democrats and Independents do not see an increase in terrorism to the US as likely; while 60 percent of Republicans do.

What you see should dampen hopes that Republicans have shifted from a Cheneyesque posture to a Paulite one. But they’re divided. And with any luck, the latest Sunni insurgency could help advance a debate in their ranks that they’ve been loath to have for many years. And that’s no small thing. The GOP’s major policy initiative in the past decade was the Iraq War. It was the signal concern of the Bush-Cheney administration and they asked the country to judge them on it. The country did – which is why Barack Obama is president. But the party then went into a strange cone of silence on the question. The neocons kept peddling the idea that the surge “worked” – which, according to its architects, meant a reconciled multi-sectarian government able to govern democratically. No one really pushed back on that transparently false narrative. And then it was on to criticizing Obama! Only now that the issue has come back into the American consciousness – and in the context of a primary process in the near-future – does the GOP have a chance to figure this all out.

My own view is that the continuing conflagration can only help Paul – because it is highly unlikely to result in anything but more grief, more violence and more terror, but with Americans more deeply involved. That’s likely, in my view, to tilt the debate away from interventionism. I could be wrong – Iraq tends to prove everyone but the deepest pessimists wrong – but this poll, cited by Philip Klein, should serve as a steaming cup of reality for the neocons:

A CNN/ORC poll taken in December 2011, around the time of the U.S. withdrawal, found that Americans expected Iraq would get overrun by terrorists, but overwhelmingly supported withdrawal anyway.

Specifically, the pollsters offered a series of scenarios and asked if they were likely or unlikely to happen in the “the next few years.” The results: 54 percent said it was unlikely Iraq would “continue to have a democratic government that will not be overthrown by terrorists”; 60 percent said it was unlikely Iraqi security forces would “be able to ensure safety and security in Iraq without assistance from the United States” and 63 percent said it was unlikely Iraq would “be able to prevent terrorists from using the country as a base of operations for planning attacks against the United States.” Despite this pessimism, 78 percent of Americans in the same poll said they approved of the decision to withdraw.

So Americans are not exactly surprised by the last few weeks. Not as surprised as the Obama administration, actually. Because they, unlike the expert fixers, see something that cannot be fixed by outsiders as the obvious conclusion. And on this, the American people, and not their leaders, are right.

First Cut

Dan Colman points to the earliest known illustration of circumcision, from a tomb in Sakkara, Egypt, that dates to 2400 B.C.E.:

The origins of circumcision remain unclear. According to this online essay, a stele (carving on stone) from the 23rd century B.C.E. suggests that an author named “Uha” was circumcised in a mass ritual. He wrote:

“When I was circumcised, together with one hundred and twenty men, there was none thereof who hit out, there was none thereof who was hit, and there was none thereof who scratched and there was none thereof who was scratched.”

By the time you get to 4,000 B.C.E., you start to find exhumed Egyptian bodies that show signs of circumcision. And then come the artistic depictions. The Sakkara depiction comes with the perhaps helpful written warning,“Hold him and do not allow him to faint.”

Previous Dish on male genital mutilation here, here, here, and here. The latest from MGM apologists:

One of the other reasons often cited for opposing circumcision — decreased penile sensitivity in circumcised men — is not borne out by science. …

One inquiry included thousands of Kenyan men who were split into two random groups, only one of which would have its participants circumcised. With a large sample of previously uncircumcised men now willing to be circumcised for the study, scientists finally had a basis for comparing sensitivities re: circumcision, and their findings belied the conventional wisdom. “Overall, the circumcised men actually report that their penises are more sensitive [after circumcision], and that they have an easier time reaching orgasm,” the authors wrote.

Further, in a collective review of 10 studies using almost 20,000 men as subjects, scientists “did not see any differences between circumcised and uncircumcised men in terms of sexual desire, pain during sex, premature ejaculation, problems with erections, or problems with orgasms.”

Obama’s Iraq Plan, Ctd

Noah Feldman understands why the president might have felt he had no choice but to re-intervene in Iraq:

Begin with the baseline: The U.S., its allies and its regional Middle Eastern opponents such as Iran cannot tolerate the existence of a functioning al-Qaeda successor state in large swaths of Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant wouldn’t be satisfied with a landlocked statelet. By ideological preference and by geostrategy, the ISIL state would have the imperative to expand to the Mediterranean coast, including Sunni-majority areas of Lebanon. [Friday], a dozen ISIL fighters were apparently under siege in a Beirut building – a sign of potential future expansion.

Once the conflict reaches Lebanon, this would probably bring in the Israelis. Nuclear Israel and near-nuclear Iran would then have to figure out whether they hated each other more than they hate Sunni al-Qaeda. If this isn’t a World War III scenario, it’s getting close.

But if these scenarios pan out, they merely make the conflict far more complex, with many more active participants, allowing many more unintended consequences to unfold. And if you want evidence that we don’t really know what’s happening or could happen, look at Washington’s surprise at the demonstrable weakness and incompetence of the Iraqi army. And conceding that we are now intervening directly – what else can Biden’s visit to Baghdad convey – and yet following up with a few hundred military advisers seems to me to give us the taint of meddling with scarcely any real influence on any outcome. Maybe it’s a form of stalling, but as the Sunni/ISIS insurgency sweeps across the Sunni parts of Iraq, it’s obviously the thin end of the wedge.

Kenneth Pollack further unpacks the “known unknowns” of the intervention:

The United States and the Maliki government (and the Iranian regime, for that matter) clearly share an interest in defending Baghdad and the other cities of central and southern Iraq from conquest by the Sunni militant coalition. However, Prime Minister Maliki is also determined to reconquer the rest of the Iraqi territory lost to the ISIS offensive last week.

That would seem to run counter to the Administration’s (entirely correct) insistence that the United States should not choose sides in the Iraqi civil war, nor help either to militarily crush the other (and jeopardize the safety of its civilian populace).

That is why Washington has, again rightly, insisted on a political strategy that would reconcile Iraq’s warring communities and ensure the safety of all. Has the Obama Administration agreed that these American advisors would support Prime Minister Maliki’s objective of retaking all of Iraq? If so, will American advisors advise/lead/accompany Maliki’s forces (ISF and Shi’a militias) if they are able to fulfill the Prime Minister’s goal of counterattacking into the Sunni-populated regions of Iraq where the potential for ethnic cleansing and atrocities against civilians will increase dramatically? If not, does the Iraqi government understand this?

At the same time, the administration says it hopes to broker a political solution to the crisis. But James Traub doesn’t see that happening as long as Maliki “can keep his grip on power while pursuing a ruthlessly sectarian agenda”:

The administration is working with Iraqi leaders to shape the process [of forming a government after April’s elections], as it did in 2010. That is not an altogether hopeful precedent. Last time around, the hope was that Maliki would govern along with Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister whose Iraqiyya party had actually won more seats than Maliki’s State of Law. This time, the White House is cajoling Shiite leaders to jettison Maliki in favor of a less divisive and authoritarian figure. According to reports from Baghdad, Shiite leaders have begun to consider doing just that.

The administration has, however, just agreed to send 300 military advisors to the country without demanding political reform as a quid-pro-quo. Obama probably felt that, with the Visigoths already rattling the gates of the capital, he could not afford to wait for the political jockeying to play out over the coming months.

Ben Van Heuvelen is more sanguine, arguing that we can affect a political reconciliation, but only with Iran’s help:

The central tenet of President Obama’s emerging Iraq strategy is that military action won’t bring stability unless Iraqi leaders can build a government that all Iraqis might be willing to fight for. “As long as those deep [ethno-sectarian] divisions continue or worsen, it’s going to be very hard for an Iraqi central government to direct an Iraqi military to deal with these threats,” he said on Thursday. The only problem with Obama’s formulation is its implicit assumption that Iraqi leaders can simply choose to make up. In aggregate, they have taken hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran, and some are directly affiliated with Iran-backed militias. As a result, only Iran can push Iraqi leaders toward reconciliation.

Ayatollah Khamenei, however, has come out against any US involvement:

“The main dispute in Iraq is between those who want Iraq to join the US camp and those who seek an independent Iraq,” said Khamenei, who has the final say over government policies. “The US aims to bring its own blind followers to power since the US is not happy about the current government in Iraq. ” Khamenei said Iraq’s government and its people, with help of top clerics, would be able to end the “sedition” there, saying extremists are hostile to both Shia and Sunni muslims who seek an independent Iraq.

Earlier on Sunday Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said some countries “feed terrorists by their petrodollars,” in a veiled reference to the Arab Gulf states, and warned that such support would come back to haunt them. “Rest assured, tomorrow will be your turn. The barbarous terrorists will go after supporters of terrorism in the future,” said Rouhani.

But is Iran the only unsavory partner we need to salvage this mess? Not according to Les Gelb: “There’s only one strategy with a decent chance of winning: forge a military and political coalition with the power to stifle the jihadis in both Iraq and Syria”:

This means partnering with Iran, Russia, and President Assad of Syria. This would be a very tricky arrangement among unfriendly and non-trusting partners, but the overriding point is that they all have common interests. All regard the jihadis as the overwhelming threat, and all would be willing to take tough joint action. And with this fighting arrangement in place, the “partners” could start seriously fixing the underlying political snake pits in Damascus and Baghdad. …

I’m certainly not saying that Assad is a good guy and that we should abandon pursuing his eventual departure, or that we can now trust Russia and Iran. Washington has and will have serious problems with all these countries. And most certainly, the U.S. will have to stay on its guard. But the fact is that there is common ground with Moscow and Tehran to combat the biggest threat to all of us at this moment. Russia frets all the time about the jihadis in the Mideast making joint cause with Muslim extremists in Russia; it’s Moscow’s number one security issue. Iran worries greatly about the Sunni jihadis torturing and killing Shiites in Syria and Iraq. There’s nothing more frightening in the world today than these religious fanatics.

As so often, Gelb adds a dash of realism. If our real problem here is the possibility of fanatical Islamist terror, then the US is only one of many powers with an interest in intervening, and Assad and Iran and Russia are our partners, not our enemies in this endeavor. But even then, there is no solution to this constantly exploding “ungrateful volcano” (as Churchill described Iraq) than a multi-sectarian democratic government and that is, by any reasonable inference of the past decade or so, a non-starter. Throwing arms, humans and money at a project that has never actually worked and that, in the current chasm, cannot work, is a mug’s game. I can see the reasons behind getting better intelligence, but not much more. On this, I stand with Rand Paul.

(Photo: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and US Secretary of State John Kerry meet at the Prime Minister’s Office in Baghdad on June 23, 2014. Kerry was in Baghdad to push for Iraqi unity and stability, as Sunni militants swept through western towns abandoned by the security forces. By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.)

Gay Republicans Leading The Way

Joe Coscarelli relays a remarkable fact:

The New York Times reports today that “this cycle, three gay Republicans running for Congress … are featuring their significant others in campaign ads, a first for a gay congressional candidate from either major political party.” Less surprisingly: The races are in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and California, all against Democratic incumbents, and with only one facing a primary. Still!

Money quote from the NYT piece:

“Republican candidates are saying it loud,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist. “They’re out and they’re proud enough to feature their partners in ads, which I think just reflects how fast this issue is moving across the American political spectrum.”

Are Democratic gay candidates still in a defensive crouch at this point?

The Paul We’ve Been Waiting For

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/480751046952628227

In a WSJ op-ed late last week, Rand Paul finally showed his cards on Iraq, taking the neocons to task and invoking Reagan to make a case for not taking sides in the Iraq conflict. On Meet The Press yesterday, he defended his position, turning Cheney’s unhinged criticism of Obama back on the former vice president himself:

Money quote:

“I think the same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq War,” Paul said. “You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? That’s what the war was sold on. Was democracy easily achievable? Was the war won in 2005, when many of these people said it was won? They didn’t really, I think, understand the civil war that would break out.”

Matt Welch compares Paul’s positions to those of the Cheneys:

The contrast is striking here not just in policy content but in tone. The Cheneys snarl about “appeasing our enemies,” “abandoning our allies,” and “apologizing for our great nation,” as if it was the 2004 Republican National Convention all over again. Paul, with the exception of one somewhat intemperate paragraph asking “Why should we listen to them again?”, approaches the question with an assumption of personal and national humility, a sense that American knowledge of (and power to shape) fluid events in the Middle East has limitations, as does American appetite for making the kind of commitments that the Cheneys of the world constantly seek … This is a pretty clearly defined fork in the road for GOP foreign policy.

Cheney’s thin retort says a lot in its omissions:

When asked about Paul’s comments, Cheney said his position hasn’t changed: “I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq, I’m a strong supporter now.” (He was more vague about what exactly the U.S. should be doing in Iraq now, aside from it being the opposite of whatever President Obama is doing.) “If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face,” Cheney continued. “Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist. He doesn’t believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world. I think it’s absolutely essential.”

Later, Cheney said he hasn’t decided who he’ll support in 2016, but suggested it won’t be Paul. “Now, Rand Paul and — by my standards, as I look at his — his philosophy, is basically an isolationist,” he said. “That didn’t work in the 1930s, it sure as heck won’t work in the aftermath of 9/11, when 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters came all the way from Afghanistan and killed 3,000 of our citizens.”

Look at the formulae that Cheney recites. He can’t actually address the debate over the Iraq war; he just reiterates his own position then and now. You get the impression he hasn’t actually had a single conversation in person challenging his rigid mindset since the war began. And once again, it’s the One Percent solution. When you posit a threat of apocalyptic devastation far beyond even the horror of 9/11, the cost-benefit analysis will always come down to maximal action everywhere and anywhere. But he hasn’t for a second absorbed that this apocalyptic vision was precisely what was debunked by the Iraq War.

There were no nukes or chemical weapons coming for us. They existed solely in Dick Cheney’s imagination. Thanks to Obama’s deal with Putin, there are also no WMDs left lying around the battlefield for ISIS to pick up and use. The alternative to getting the hell out of a region where we have only sowed chaos and sectarian warfare to no measurable gain is the boogey-man of “isolationism.” You have to conclude that Cheney is intellectually dead. Nothing that happened in the last fourteen years has made even the slightest dent in his terrorized worldview. Sometimes I wonder if Cheney was seriously traumatized by 9/11 in ways even more profound than the rest of us – it occurred on his watch, after all, and he was the recipient of all sorts of terrifying intelligence in the months that followed. But to have reacted by never moving on from his own terror on 9/12 is not a position. It’s a condition.

Meanwhile, Kilgore finds it odd that Paul references Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger:

Cap was less famous for his “doctrine” than for his persistence in securing the highest level of defense spending imaginable. In his endlessly fascinating account of the budget wars of Reagan’s first term, The Triumph of Politics, David Stockman all but calls Weinberger a traitor for his mendacious and successful efforts to trick Ronald Reagan into double-loading defense increases into his seminal 1981 budget proposal. This is one part of the Reagan-Weinberger legacy Paul will probably not want to emulate. And it matters: the most obvious way to convince reflexively belligerent Republicans that he’s kosher despite opposing various past, present and future military engagements would be to insist on arming America to the teeth. But Paul’s government-shrinking visions would make that sort of gambit very difficult. And try as he might, it will be very difficult for Paul to make a credible claim Ronald Reagan stood tall for taming the Pentagon.

The hawks are having a field day, of course. Here’s Rubin:

Understand that he doesn’t merely say we shouldn’t put boots on the ground; he argues that we don’t have an interest in the outcome. He manages to get through an entire op-ed without recognizing that a state dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) would represent a bigger threat to the United States than Afghanistan did pre-9/11. Paul observes that the Iraq war was harder than anticipated but ignores the success of the surge and the peaceful, stable state in which the George W. Bush administration left Iraq. He also borrows President Obama’s false talking point that we couldn’t leave forces there. (Paul incidentally doesn’t understand or is deliberately misleading readers when he says our actions in Syria contribute to the rise of ISIS there; in fact, had we swiftly pushed out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there would have been no – zero – ISIS fighters there.)

Which Party Will Lead The Energy Revolution? Ctd

Jim Manzi recently repeated his belief that government-funded innovation is the best weapon we have against climate change. Chait accused Manzi and his ilk of being all talk. Samuel Thernstrom of the Energy Innovation Reform Project sticks up for Manzi:

It is true that one of the unfortunate costs of the Obama administration’s ill-advised investments in Solyndra and other bad bets in their effort to pick winners in the market of energy technologies was an erosion of conservatives’ longstanding support for basic R&D. (ARPA-E is actually an outgrowth of a George W. Bush administration initiative to create “innovation hubs” at DOE.) But despite the backlash, the picture is not nearly what Chait paints: My organization works with conservatives on these issues and our experience is that there is an enormous appetite for these ideas—but the most frequent objection I hear is the widespread disbelief that liberals would ever accept them. Reading Chait, you can see why they feel that way.

If liberals want conservatives to join them in causes like climate change, they would be wise to spend some time thinking about whether there is anything that they can do to make the proposition more appealing. My organization favors funding for ARPA-E — but before we ask Americans to give the Department of Energy more money, let’s restructure it to make it an agency that’s capable of spending money effectively. Secretary Moniz has actually taken some steps in the right direction recently, which I applaud. Imagine what could be done if that work was actually the focus of the administration’s efforts rather than its quixotic charge at carbon regulations. The Department of Energy should be at the forefront of our climate response, not the Environmental Protection Agency — and Chait is wrong to think that we don’t need to recognize that.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Dov Zakheim pushes Washington to recognize the Kurdish claim to independence, but he doubts the administration will go for it:

The pro-Western, anti-Islamist Kurds are America’s natural allies. During the nineties, they were the focus of American support while Saddam Hussein was in power. Yet the administration remains reluctant to exert itself on their behalf, and, in particular, to help modernize their military equipment.

For their part, however, the Kurds, having seized Kirkuk, their historic capital, are determined both to control that city and their long-term fate. They will press for independence if the sectarian fighting continues to rage south of their border. The Obama administration, which quickly recognized a far less stable South Sudan, should recognize the new Kurdish state. Given its willingness to work even with Iran in order to prop up the central government in Baghdad, however, it is unlikely to do so, prompting Kurdish resentment that will not easily be mollified.

But the case for Kurdistan isn’t as clear-cut as Zakheim wants it to be. The Bloomberg editors make the opposing argument:

U.S. President Barack Obama [last] week explained why keeping Iraq whole and stable is a U.S. national security interest. Kurdistan’s secession would make an extended and destabilizing sectarian war to redraw the borders of the Middle East, from Jordan to Iran, more likely.

So what can officials in Baghdad and Washington do to persuade Kurds to remain part of Iraq?

They might start by noting how difficult it can be for internationally unrecognized states to thrive. Iran and — depending on the response of Turkey’s Kurdish minority — Turkey could turn on a self-proclaimed Kurdish state, making for a tough and lonely existence.

Iraq’s central government, encouraged by the U.S., should also demonstrate that it accepts the new reality that has emerged since the collapse of the army in Mosul. The Kurds will not walk away from oil-rich Kirkuk, and that should be reflected in Iraq’s internal borders. Nor should they be expected to continue to submit to an arrangement for sharing oil revenues, enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, that centralizes all control and payments in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the newly assertive Kurds seem to be doing whatever the heck they want, such as delivering oil to Israel:

In a step that cements the impression of a de facto independent Kurdistan, a million barrels of Kurdish oil were delivered to a client in Israel today, despite threats by Baghdad to sue anyone buying it. The US government, fearing another blow to embattled Baghdad, had also worked to prevent anyone from buying the oil.

Reuters broke the story in a scoop, followed a few hours later by a statement on the Kurdish government website. “We are proud of this milestone achievement, which was accomplished despite almost three weeks of intimidation and baseless interferences from Baghdad against the tanker-ship owners and the related international traders and buyers.”

Josh sounds off on the shipment:

The relationship between the Kurds and Israel is by no means new, though it has never been formal. It also appears that the oil delivered to the Israeli port of Askelon is likely not destined for use locally but rather for storage and eventual shipment elsewhere. For the Israelis, though, it is a key part of a strategy to deepen relations with the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as access new supplies of energy.

For the Kurds of course the implications are potentially profound. The ability to export oil at scale entirely outside the control of the Iraqi central government is a huge step toward de facto independence, whether or not the Kurds took the step of formally severing ties with Iraq.

Previous Dish on the Kurds here, here, here, and here.

(Flag of Kurdistan via Wiki)

Giving Debtors Their Due

Arguing that the United States “was built on debt,” Claude S. Fischer takes a benign view of our borrowing and spending, especially countering those who blame it for the recent financial crisis:

The Americans who couldn’t get a bailout took on loans for what they thought were the right reasons. Yes, between 1989 and 2007, with more and more businesses accepting credit cards, Americans roughly tripled their credit card debt, a $2,300 rise in outstanding balances per family. But the swell of debt is almost entirely accounted for by the cost of housing, which grew as more Americans became homeowners. In those same years, 1989 to 2007, Americans increased their mortgage debt by an average of $46,000 per family. One may protest that Americans bought “too much house,” but in an era of stagnant wages, houses stood out as good investments. And, until the bubble burst, they were. Americans were not engaged in a bacchanal of self-indulgent borrowing. The percentage of family debt incurred for “goods and services” hardly changed between 1989 and 2007. Americans were buying—or borrowing—into the smart-money strategy of real estate ownership.

After the bubble burst, between 2007 and 2010, credit card balances dropped by about $800 and mortgage debt by about $3,500 per family. The biggest change lately in the debt burden has been a rapid increase in borrowing for education, which is also investment rather than consumption, and is driven not by private habits of excess but by college and state government budgets.

Koons In The 21st Century

Later this month, the Whitney will unveil its major retrospective on Jeff Koons. In a profile, Ingrid Sischy notes that, for an artist whose auction sales totaled $177 million in the last year, Koons seems to care little about cash:

Barbara Kruger, the artist whose unsentimental pronouncements have been cutting to the chase about the art world for decades, says “Oh boy” when I call to discuss Koons, whom she has known since they both were starting out in New York. She needed to think about it and later wrote me: “Jeff is like the man who fell to earth, who, in this grotesque time of art flippage and speculative mania, is either the icing on the cake or some kind of Piketty-esque harbinger of the return of Brecht’s ‘making strange.’ Or a glitteringly bent version of that alienated vision. He brings the cake and lets them eat it.”

Kruger’s reference to Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book [Capital in the Twenty-First Century] on the current chasm between the very rich and the very poor has become a cultural touchstone, is part of the whole picture; this social reality is what one can’t help thinking about when one hears about the prices of contemporary art today, especially the sums that Koons’s works are fetching.

The odd thing, as many who know Koons, including Kruger, will say, is that money doesn’t interest him. … In Koons’s public life there is no showy “I am rich” stuff. Money is mostly a means to an end for him to create his art. What he does need is wealthy patrons. [Curator Scott] Rothkopf, whose retrospective is blessedly clear-eyed, puts it this way: “If it is going to cost several million dollars to produce new work, he has got to martial the resources from wealthy patrons to produce this thing. He has to convince extremely wealthy people, via art dealers, to buy into the dream of this perfect object.”

Previous Dish on the artist here.

(Photo of sculpture by Koons via dierk schaefer)

Philosophy For The Fun Of It

In an interview about his forthcoming book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, Peter Unger sighs over the pretensions his field, arguing that “when you’re doing philosophy, you don’t have a prayer of offering even anything close to a correct or even intelligible answer” to the big questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and the like. So why pursue it? He maintains that “for lots of people there’s fun in doing philosophy”:

With a certain proviso, philosophy is an enjoyable form of literature, at least for people of a certain training and temperament.

The proviso is that a fair amount of it contains special symbols instead of words, so that it looks like some sort of scientific thing, almost like an equation. Mathematics, symbolic logic, so on and so forth. So philosophers put that in, and give themselves the impression that they’re doing things ‘ohhh, so scientifically’ that they need the math. All this makes it much less enjoyable to me. I don’t like reading that stuff. But insofar as we can get over all of that useless and pretentious writing, it’s an enjoyable sort of literature, if they take the time to make it reader-friendly.

Take Derek Parfit’s book, Reasons and Persons. It’s in four parts. The first part is not enjoyable to read, because he talks about a lot of theories which he labels with letters. You can’t keep it straight, you need a scorecard next to the page. But the other three parts don’t have that, and they’re tremendously enjoyable to read — at least for some people who have some training in philosophy, and have the temperament for it. It’s wonderful stuff, fascinating stuff.

Reasons and Persons is extremely enjoyable. But does Parfit ever discover anything? No, not at all. Does he ever make credible, interesting new statements about concrete reality? No, not even close. But it’s very enjoyable literature for very many people.