A scary word

Okay, let's all sit down because I am about to introduce an incendiary word into the conversation. A word that frightens children and evokes an image of moral monsters. But I don't want anyone to think of it that way. I want to convince you that the word actually means something common and familiar. It occurs in the following sentence and I think you'll spot it right away.

The kind of moral argument that Tyler Cowen is pushing is called nihilism.

Okay, I know what you are thinking but nihilism is a pretty common and familiar position these days. This song is nihilist and so is this one. Lennon's song in particular has become the inspiration for a charity; it's not Mein Kampf. You could even say nihilism is the opposite of that book which describes life as a struggle.

What makes john Lennon, Peggy Lee and Tyler Cowen nihilists? It's a negative quality. These songs argue—and they both make a powerful and influential moral argument—that certain kinds of beliefs undermine our ability to be happy. Nihilists do not refuse to believe in anything at all. They believe in trees, rocks and glasses of orange juice just like everyone else. But there are certain very big moral organizing principles that they want to encourage us to give up on. They think that we can find freedom and happiness by doing so. Tyler Cowen is a nihilist in that sense.

His real target in that lecture is not stories but certain big moral ideas. Over the next few posts I'll try to prove that to you.


PS: A pedantic philosopher point. If there is one thing people think they know about nihilism it is that Nietzsche was a nihilist. He was not! If we put Tyler Cowen in a time machine and took him back to meet Nietzsche, Nietzsche would hate Tyler Cowen with a passion that would not be pleasant to contemplate. The last thing in the world Nietzsche wanted was for people to accept their messes.

The metaphors compared (2)

Tyler Cowen has picked his metaphor well just as Oakeshott did. If we look at it a bit, I think you will see that it is a brilliant metaphor.

We can leave a mess just like we can leave a park but we don't do so with the same attitude. A park is a place we visit and no one will condemn us for ignoring the park for a while. It's very different if we ignore a mess. And when we talk about leaving a mess we say things such as "running away from the mess".

Tyler Cowen is an economist and he is very interested in behaviourial economics. A mess is a good metaphor for him because our economic lives are not like history. We live here in the mess. There is a moral obligation to "face the mess". With the park, the moral of* the metaphor suggests we go to this place and act frivolously. With the mess, the moral of the metaphor suggests that we are trying to escape something if we can't face our mess.



* And yes, after praising Cowen for several posts, I just slipped the first critical jab in here like a picador quietly stirring the bull up for slaughter. The sharp implement was "the moral of".

The metaphors compared (1)

So we have a park and a mess. Let's think about what those two metaphors imply starting with the park.

A park is somewhere you visit and a place you can leave at will. There is a lot of stuff in a park; there are benches, paths, grass, trees, shrubs and play areas. When we exercise our opinions like a whippet we trace a line of convenience across the park and ignore the vast majority of stuff there. Like Cowen's stories, the whippet excludes a whole lot of territory. He is more interested in grass and paths because that suits what he likes to do (which is to run very fast). Likewise, we exercise our opinions by running them through the parts where they can travel easily ignoring the more complex and difficult terrain.

The historian Oakeshott admired the most was a guy named Frederick William Maitland. Maitland didn't write stories, he painstakingly went over source material looking for details that didn't fit stories. His most famous work as an historian was to pour over ancient parliamentary rolls and prove that the story of the English parliaments was NOT what everyone thought it was.

That's all good stuf and I'm with Oakeshott (and Cowen if he wants in) when it comes to history. But history is something we only do sometimes. We can leave history just like we leave the park and get back to our real lives.

Another metaphor

Okay, I'm going to try and make a very complicated point here and I may be hard to follow. I want to draw something about Cowen's idea of a mess out and I want to do it by comparing him to someone else who has an approach similar to his. The point of the comparison, though, is to highlight something unique to Tyler Cowen and not what he has in common with this other guy.

The other guy is an intellectual historian and philosopher, now dead, named Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott came from a school of historians who distrusted stories. They did so specifically because they distrusted a specific type of story called Whig history. What exactly that is doesn't really matter here. The thing that matters is that he doesn't like stories.

And he has a metaphor too. I'm going from memory so this won't be verbatim but Oakeshott says that history is increasingly a place where we exercise our opinions like we exercise whippets in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

Whippets are very lean, fast dogs sort of like greyhounds only smaller. Imagine you are looking down on a park from an upper story and every once in a while one of these dogs flits across the park, tracing a line, running very quickly—and then its gone.