Thoughts for the Weekend

* Wyatt Mason at Harper's has one of the better appraisals of John Updike as book critic that I've come across. 'His reviews were generous, but not in the sense that he regularly mollycoddled mediocrity. He tried to take at books on the terms they set for themselves, then tried to evaluate how well they managed on those terms, then looked at whether those terms were themselves adequate, useful, or beautiful. This habit of mind alone is unusual in the practice of long form literary criticism, which in lesser hands attached to meaner minds devolves into a sport of knaves.'

Author Gish Jen, whom Updike cited as his literary heir, also has reflection on the person and his importance at The New Republic. She writes that Updike was, 'a genuinely kind and generous human being. My editor, Ann Close, recently told me that for most of his career, Updike refused to take an advance from Knopf. He did everything in his power to help the house, and literary organizers of every stripe will attest to the time and effort he has poured into supporting literary culture. His death is All Wrong; no one would accept this in a novel; everything about it says, Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite!'

* The Library of America is having a nice 50% off sale that includes Paul Bowles, Yvor Winters, Kenneth Koch, John Dos Passos, and George Washington. Now that's a grab bag.

* Economists always make me chuckle a little bit. Even before this crisis, I was at least a skeptic. My question was always about the vicissitudes of human nature, How do you know what people will actually do? People aren't chemicals and there are no natural laws of behavior, so the results are pretty far from certain. Not only that, but it always seemed like economists were behind the curve a bit, and never more than in this Atlantic Monthly article by Bart Wilson. He writes about something called the Ultimatum Game, which is essentially a test-case of the groundbreaking, cutting-edge theories of Plato's Republic. He writes, 'The Ultimatum Game is so popular because it is simple to explain and simple to run, yet its results involve one of the most complex problems of society: what are we saying when we say something is "fair"?'

Being neither a mathmatician or a scientist, I think to myself now, 'How odd: economists have somehow stumbled upon the question of Justice.' This should be interesting, if unnecessarily complicated. I wonder if they're walking to Piraeus, too.

Wilson has at least heard of Plato (he must be a Harvard guy) and gives the old man nod with, 'it is not some pure platonic ideal of fairness,' but I think that he doesn't give enough credit to the work that Plato / Socrates is doing in that two-millennia–old text. In The Republic, each concept of Justice is put to a human test; the question is never asked in a pure-logic theoretical vacuum, even though there was no concept of a scientific method (that wouldn't come until Aristotle, and then fully worked out post-Renaissance). Socrates, in the text, discusses the concept in terms of agreement and argument, and what human beings might actually do. When they arrive at a definition upon which all can agree, the question — for the time, at least — is settled. This is Wilson's breakthrough as well, 'Fairness really boils down to an issue of agreement: can we agree on what rules this particular context calls for?' Well, yes: welcome to the Socratic Method, Bart.