Links for Monday

April 1, 2024

No fooling, there were so many great essays this last week, all hitting on various themes I’ve touched on recently:

• First up, this brilliant essay by Joe Carlsmith about attunement as a lens through which to view ethics:

  What is attunement? I'm thinking of it, roughly, as a kind of meaning-laden receptivity to the world.⁶ Something self-related goes quieter, and recedes into the background; something beyond-self comes to the fore. There is a kind of turning outwards, a kind of openness; and also, a kind of presence, a being in the world. And that world, or some part of it, comes forward as it always has been—except, often, strangely new, and shining with meaning.

  On attunement

• Incredibly moving eulogy to his father, written by Oshan Jarow. I loved the way it interweaves the story of his father’s spiritual journey with the question of what a modern spiritual path looks like:

  Sadhana is a commitment to reclaiming our experience of the world, refashioning our attunement to the present by routinely undertaking voluntary practices with uncommon devotion. For me, it suggests both a conceptual remembrance and a somatic dive into the mysteries that quiet the mind’s darwinian motion, and builds roots thick enough to keep a sense of that mystery even after the practice ends and the rhythms of daily life resume, when the bills are due and laundry needs to be switched over into the dryer.

  Because that’s what it takes to become anything that runs agains the stream of how your life’s circumstances steer you by default¹ — an unwavering, nearly impossible devotion to practices for transformation, despite it all. Sadhana is to repaint our habitual experience of life, to progressively cast it in a sacred light through sustained intention and practice.

  Pouring milk on my father's scalding bones

• This was a wonderful historical excavation of how the rational/technological perspective on being has come to dominate ethics. It’s worth reading in full.

  As Hartmut Rosa has argued, “[t]he cultural achievement of modernity is that it has nearly perfected human beings’ ability to establish a certain distance from the world while at the same time bringing it within our manipulative reach”.¹⁰ That is, we “remove” ourselves theoretically from the world into a position of speculative detachment, but in a coordinated maneuver, we also reach back into the world and manipulate it for our own purposes. Although both of these developments are indeed enduring possibilities for the way we conceive and relate to the world, one of the unique departures of the modern age is the intensification of this “aggressive-distancing relationship” with things.¹¹ This dual tendency—both elements of which were crucial for the establishment of the modern ethic of control I’m interested in here—began to be formulated in Europe in the seventeenth-century. 

Control Group

• Bonus Effective Altruism criticism: it’s really hard to do good at scale - this Wired piece by philosopher Leif Wenar does a great job articulating all the problems with the maximizing / big / heaven / top of morality / utilitarian perspective. It’s pretty mean in tone, though, and unsurprisingly some EA folks are mad about it. The central points of rebuttal the EA make is 1) EA “compared to what?”, 2) does this just encourage nihilism/inaction, and 3) criticizing the particularist localist perspective Wenar articulates as far worse:

  My friend Aaron is a fine philosopher and a lifelong surfer. A dozen years ago, he made it to Indonesia and traveled up from a beach on Nias to villages near Lagundri Bay. He has now been back many times and has built up relationships, including one with a local leader named Damo. Aaron and Damo have become close, and they talk a lot. Aaron knows he’ll never be part of the island, that it’s not his life. But when Damo persuaded his village to put in water tanks and toilets, Aaron volunteered to help with planning. When Aaron got an advance on a book contract, the money went with him on his yearly trip to the island.
  
  No billionaires, no hype, no heroes. Aaron is trying his best to shift his power to Damo and to the people on the island. Aaron will talk about the island if you ask him, but he never brags. And he’s accountable to the people there—in the way all of us are accountable to the real, flesh-and-blood humans we love.

  On the one hand, this is a nice statement in favor of doing good where you are, forging personal relationships, etc. On the other hand, being a tourist and making friends with locals has a smack of “white savior” and itself could create harmful side effects. It’s really hard to do good locally too! Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

  Another answer to “EA compared to what” is more about the idea of Earn to Give specifically — maybe it’s actually better if you don’t earn to give, don’t make a big pile of money, precisely because it’s impossible to correctly give away big piles of money. Having big piles of money cuts you off from people, and being close to people is what you need in order to give away money effectively¹. Finally I would add that we should exercise humility in the face of our own cluelessness, and echoing Wenar, be suspicious of situations where people claim that their own personal benefits and the greater good perfectly coincide.

• Emmett Shear makes a version of this argument here.

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