What Gibbon has to teach us: Learn to change your mind

Charles King, What the Definitive Book on Empires Says About America Today, NYTimes, July 13, 2026

Charles King has a lot to say about Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the current situation in America, and the application of the former to the latter. For example, setting the stage:

Anyone living in the 18th century could see the contemporary relevance of Gibbon’s Rome — just as we can see it today, during the year of America’s semiquincentennial. “Substitute the word America for the word Rome,” Henry Adams wrote after reading “Decline and Fall” in 1860, “and the question became personal.” Adams could sense the work’s significance for the United States, which was then mired in sectional conflict and preparing for civil war. In the century and a half since, Gibbon has been reliably cited as the perennial prophet of what happens when a good country goes bad.

Here's the heart of the matter:

Because Gibbon has become a universal sage, it is easy to miss this principal fact about him and his great work. He was an honest historian who, in an age of political division, fading empires and revolutionary upheavals, scribbled a long book with a large and surprising message at its core. Gibbon’s singular insight was that the whole point of reading a history book — or writing one — is not to come away with one big truth. The stealthy purpose of studying history is to get you comfortable with changing your mind.

That resonates with me, not so much for its applicability to the current state of American politics and society. Rather, I believe it's what I'm up to with my book on AI, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. That's why I'm putting two chapters of (science) fiction in an eight chapter book where the other chapters are non-fiction.

Later:

At its most basic, making the chaotic events of the past into a coherent thing we call history is an act of intentional, purposeful understanding. History forces us to confront things we don’t comprehend, decisions we can’t fathom, and ways of being and believing that seem utterly bizarre. It makes us look for evidence in unlikely places. It requires that we think like grown-ups, drawing conclusions that we know will change when the available evidence does.

Facing up to AI has similar requirements.

All the things we consider normal, dear and true will one day pass away, as they did for the thousands of emperors, queens, citizens, soldiers, philosophers, priests and parents who populated “Decline and Fall.” Yet the possibility of happiness, meaning and a legacy that matters lies not in a disembodied hope for a better future. It lies in the hard evidence — here, let me show you, Gibbon tells us across the centuries — that the dead managed these things, too.

I can't say that (science) fiction counts as evidence. It does not. But it may made you open to different evidentiary requirements, different modes of construal.

There's more at the link.

Conversations with Tyler: A Special Conversation with Nicholas Copernicus, Adam Smith, and William Stanley Jevons

I was feeling impish this morning, so I gave Claude 4.6 Sonnet (Medium) the following prompt:

Back in the 20th century Steve Allen did a series of TV shows called “Meeting of Minds,” where people from different time periods were brought together to have a discussion. I want you to imagine a special episode of “Conversations with Tyler” in which Tyler Cowen moderates a discussion between Copernicus, Adam Smith, and Stanley Jevons on economics. For reference I have placed three documents in the project folder. Two books by Tyler Cowen, one on marginalism and the other on the Great Economists (GOAT), which has material on Adam Smith.. There’s a shorter document by Copernicus (in Latin), filename, “Copernicus on economics.”

I’ve appended its response below the entirely imaginary Five TC Bucks note. Click on the image to see the detail. Note that ChatGPT did the image, not Claude.

Conversations with Tyler: A Special Episode
Tyler Cowen in Conversation with Nicholas Copernicus, Adam Smith, and William Stanley Jevons

[Recorded live at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. The set is the standard one — a small round table, minimal lighting, no audience. Tyler Cowen sits across from three guests who have, for the purposes of this episode, been freed from the constraints of mortality and non-overlapping centuries. Copernicus speaks through a translator when needed, though he proves surprisingly comfortable in English, given how many languages he actually commanded. Smith retains his Edinburgh-via-Kirkcaldy cadence. Jevons is precise, energetic, and fidgets with what appears to be a small logometer.]

* * * * *

TYLER: So let me start with something that might seem unfair to Nicholas, but I think actually redounds to his credit. Tyler Cowen — the other Tyler Cowen, me — has written that astronomers of the sixteenth century were sometimes better economists than the economists of the same period, because there essentially were no economists. And that you, Nicholas, were one of the first people to state the quantity theory of money. Now here's my question: did you think of yourself as doing economics, or did you think of yourself as solving a political crisis?

COPERNICUS: The distinction you draw would not have occurred to me. I was asked by the Diet of Prussia — by the princes, by the king's administrators — to address a practical emergency. The currency of this land had been debased so many times, by so many hands, in so many mints, that commerce had ceased to function in any stable way. The goldsmiths prospered — they were the only ones who could extract the silver from the degraded coin before the next debasement arrived. Everyone else suffered. So yes, I was solving a political crisis. But a crisis requires a theory, or you are merely thrashing. You cannot prescribe a remedy for a disease you have not diagnosed.

TYLER: And your diagnosis was what exactly?

COPERNICUS: That money is a mensura — a measure. It is like a unit of length or weight. If your ulna varies from day to day, you cannot do carpentry. If your currency varies in its silver content from month to month, you cannot do trade. The injury to commerce is the same in both cases, but the monetary injury is more insidious because it proceeds occulta quadam ratione — by a kind of hidden logic. People notice a bad harvest immediately. They do not immediately notice that the coin has been shaved, but they feel its effects: prices rise, foreign merchants refuse your money, the best craftsmen leave for regions with sounder currency.

SMITH: If I may — this is exactly the confusion I spent considerable effort untangling in Wealth of Nations when I took on the mercantilists. They believed that the accumulation of specie was wealth. What Canon Copernicus is describing from his Prussian experience is that even that modest goal — hoarding silver — is self-defeating. The moment you debase the coinage, you have, in a sense, exported your silver to every foreign merchant clever enough to melt the coins.

COPERNICUS: Precisely. The goldsmiths and those who know the quality of metals — they are the only beneficiaries. They collect the old coin, extract the silver, sell it at a premium, and leave behind a pile of copper. My recommendation was blunt: stop minting until the existing coin has restored its value, establish at most two mints for all of Prussia, and make the coin of one mint and one standard.

TYLER: Gresham's Law, essentially, before Gresham.

COPERNICUS: Before whom?

TYLER: Thomas Gresham. He gets credit for the principle that bad money drives out good. Roughly a generation after you stated it.

COPERNICUS: (pause) This is the way of things. Copernicus waits for Copernicus. In astronomy as in monetary theory.

JEVONS: I want to press on the word "measure," if I may. Canon Copernicus treats money as a standard — a fixed reference against which goods are priced. But what I discovered, or rather what I was forced to discover when trying to establish whether the value of gold had actually fallen after the Australian and Californian gold rushes of the 1850s, is that money itself has no fixed value. It is itself a commodity whose degree of utility — whose marginal utility, to use the language I was then working out — varies with its quantity. The quantity theory you describe is already implicit in this: flood the market with debased coin, and each unit of coin buys less, not merely because there is more of it, but because its intrinsic silver content is lower and everyone knows it. 

[Note: I did an Ngram search on “marginal utility” and found that it didn’t have an appreciable presence in books until a bit after 1880. Jevons did not use the phrase. He talked of “final degree of utility.”]  

COPERNICUS: I will not quarrel with the analysis, though your language differs from mine. What I found is that the regions of Prussia which had maintained good currency were also the regions with flourishing workshops, skilled artisans, and abundant goods. The regions with debased currency had become idle. You say this is because the marginal utility of a sound currency is higher. I say it is because craftsmen and merchants are not fools: they will go where their labor and their goods are honestly compensated. 

[I wonder what Copernicus could have understood by the phrase, "marginal utility"?] 

TYLER: Adam, let me come to you here. Smith, you spent a great deal of Wealth of Nations attacking mercantilism — the view that national wealth consists in the accumulation of precious metals. But you also granted mercantilists more credit than many of your defenders are comfortable with. You said their arguments were "partly solid and partly sophistical." What did you actually concede to them?

SMITH: What I conceded is that commerce and defense are entangled in ways that pure theory does not capture cleanly. The Navigation Acts — requiring that trade to Britain's colonies be carried in British ships — were bad economics by almost any reckoning. They raised prices, restricted trade, enriched a narrow set of interests at the expense of the broader public. But I wrote, and I meant it, that defense is of more importance than opulence, and that the Navigation Acts, whatever their economic defects, had served to maintain British naval power. One cannot always afford the luxury of consistent principle. (small smile) Though I tried to be consistent as often as possible.

TYLER: Jevons, here is a question directed at you specifically: why did it take from roughly 1776, the publication of Wealth of Nations, until 1871, the publication of your Theory of Political Economy, for economics to absorb the idea that value is determined at the margin — by the last unit, not the total quantity? Smith understood the diamonds-water paradox but did not resolve it. You resolved it. What took so long?

JEVONS: I have thought about this a great deal, and I believe the answer is that the resolution required mathematics, and economics had declined to use mathematics, or rather had not yet learned that it could use mathematics. The idea that utility diminishes with quantity is not — once stated — particularly obscure. Galileo came close to it. My precursors in the British literature, Jennings and MacLeod, came close to it. But close is not enough. You need to be able to state the law precisely, apply it to a schedule, differentiate, and find the first-order conditions. You need calculus, or at least the habit of mind that calculus cultivates. Once I had that tool in hand, the whole of exchange theory reorganized itself very quickly. I felt it opening up.

Alexandria as the Manhattan of the ancient world, Rome, writing (Rank 2 culture)

Tyler Cowen, Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization (Ep. 278), May 27, 2026.

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world’s leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, covers the 300-year Ptolemaic period — stranger and more modern-feeling than the Egypt of the pyramids, built around commerce and cosmopolitanism rather than divine kingship, and home to the greatest concentration of scientific talent the ancient world ever saw.

Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor’s visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.

After the preliminaries, the first of three segments from the whole conversation:

I. On intellectual activity of Alexandria

COWEN: How large was the library in Alexandria and how did they build that out?

WILKINSON: This is interesting because the Ptolemaic kings not only wanted to be wealthy economically, but they wanted to be renowned throughout the ancient world as great scholar leaders. They thought it was important that a new dynasty establish its credentials as a patron of the arts and of learning, not just as the head of a great commercial enterprise.

They invited all the leading scholars from the Greek-speaking world, from right across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, where they provided them with a library, with what was called a museum or a temple of the muses, a place where scholars could think great thoughts and be well looked after. The library was developed over centuries, really, as the greatest repository of learning that the world had ever seen up to this point. It is thought that maybe at its height, it contained half a million volumes, half a million manuscripts, mostly written on papyrus, but representing really the sum total of human knowledge at that time.

COWEN: Euclid and Eratosthenes are connected to this era?

WILKINSON: Almost any big name from ancient science has some connection with Alexandria. Euclid, the mathematician, studied there. Eratosthenes, who quite amazingly calculated the circumference of the earth, he carried out those calculations in Alexandria. There were leaders in the fields of astronomy, of anatomy and medicine, of geography, of philosophy, of literary theory. They were all active in Alexandria under the patronage of the Ptolemaic kings.

COWEN: Am I correct in thinking that the era was quite weak in philosophy in some ways? There’s no great name. Maybe it’s all lost manuscripts. It seems to be a bit like China, infrastructure intensive. They build amazing things. It’s commercial, but they’re not really thinkers.

WILKINSON: I think that would be a misrepresentation. Alexandria under the Ptolemies didn’t produce a Socrates or a Plato. It is true. What its scholars did was to synthesize strands of philosophy from ancient Greek thought, ancient Egyptian thought, Babylonian thought, ancient Hebrew philosophy and religion. It was a melting pot. It maybe didn’t throw up the big name, but it was a very fertile ground for the exchange and the interchange of ideas.

COWEN: Say I try to read Diodorus. There’s a lot of detail, but it’s not to me very interesting. It just seems much worse than Herodotus, who is profound and in a way a step back. Maybe that’s not representative.

WILKINSON: I think there are a lot more scholarly works, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you’ve just mentioned.

COWEN: What was it exactly that was so special about the intellectual, and scientific, and productive environment of Alexandria and environs? Was it that the Egyptians were there, or the mix of Greeks and Egyptians, or something else? What?

WILKINSON: I think there are three factors, really. One is certainly the Egyptian context. I don’t think those intellectual advances that were made in Alexandria could have been made anywhere else. Let’s take anatomy, for example. In the Greek world in general, there was a taboo on cutting up human bodies. Of course, ancient Egypt had a long tradition of mummification, which involved dissecting human corpses. If you were an anatomist and you wanted to make discoveries about how the organs functioned, the only place you could do that at this time was ancient Egypt. The same is true, actually, in many other branches of science. The Egyptian traditions of scholarship and of learning really laid the foundations for Greek thinkers to take them to the next level.

The second aspect was the wonderful infrastructure that was put in place by the Ptolemies to lure scholars to Alexandria. They were paid handsomely. They had access to the world’s best library. They had all of the facilities at their disposal. There was really no better place to be than Alexandria.

The third factor was really the kleptomania of the Ptolemaic rulers. They were not just bibliophiles, but they wanted to acquire a copy, preferably the original, of every book and manuscript circulating in the ancient Greek world. To that end, they indulged in downright thieving. They sent a word, for example, to Athens, which was one of the great centers of scholarship, a rival center of learning, and requested copies of books from Athens’ city library. The copies arrived in Alexandria. They were then seized by the Ptolemaic authorities and kept for Alexandria’s own library. They were only too happy to pay the fine because they had the books. It was a combination of factors that really led Alexandria to being the greatest center for scholars and for scholarship.

II. From the Ptolemaic Empire to Rome

COWEN: Given all the successes, what should I think of as the limiting principle behind rule here? It stretches as far as what we would call Cyprus today, but it never becomes a very large area, right? Now, it doesn’t become the next Roman Empire. Why doesn’t it?

WILKINSON: At its greatest extent, the Ptolemaic Empire includes much of the coast of modern-day Libya, certainly Cyprus, the Nile Valley, parts of present-day Lebanon, and Syria and Turkey, and some islands in the Aegean. It’s not as big as the Roman Empire would later be. What are its constraining factors? Partly, it’s a lack of ambition. Not a lack of ambition, moderate ambition.

The Ptolemies really want to rule Egypt, which is regarded as the jewel in Alexander the Great’s crown. It’s the most prosperous part of his empire. The other territories that they conquer in a ring around Egypt are really only there as a defensive buffer zone to protect Egypt. They have no particular ambition to create a world empire as Alexander the Great did. That was one constraining factor.

They are also not the only players in the ancient world. There are other powerful dynasties of kings in Asia and in the Greek mainland who have territorial designs of their own. It keeps these various powers in equilibrium, and it stops one of them becoming dominant, really, until the Romans upend the whole system. I suppose, yes, those are the two constraining factors, ambition and competition.

COWEN: Do you think the Romans had the ambition in a way Ptolemaic Egypt did not?

WILKINSON: Yes, I do. I think the Romans were motivated by a real desire to conquer. Ancient Roman military leaders were only as good as their last victory on the battlefield. You see that in the later days of the Republic and the beginning of the empire. Whereas in ancient Egyptian tradition, certainly, military success was not the benchmark of a successful reign. It was something that you needed to do in order to protect your own borders. There were other achievements—honoring the gods, building great temples, presiding over a glittering civilization—that were considered equally important.

COWEN: How is it that all this ends, or at least starts to decline? What’s the mechanism?

WILKINSON: It begins with the finances. The Ptolemaic Empire becomes overstretched. It has to invest hugely in its armed forces in order to fend off not just the growing predations of Rome, but actually its closer neighbors as well. That leads to higher taxes. There’s a series of climatic shocks, poor Niles leading to poor harvests. It’s a perfect storm. The economy goes south pretty quickly. The only solution that the Ptolemies can see is to go cap in hand to Roman moneylenders to bail out the Egyptian economy. That then really gives Rome leverage over Egypt.

That all gets bound up in the republican politics of Rome and in the rivalry between Caesar and his rivals, and then ultimately Octavian, who becomes the first emperor, Augustus. Egypt goes from being a great civilization, confident of itself, to being a pawn in other people’s power play. Ultimately, Rome is able to march into Alexandria, overthrow Cleopatra, and seize Egypt for itself. It’s a salutary lesson for our own time that a civilization can appear to the outside world to be magnificent, and wealthy, and successful, but actually the seeds of its own destruction are usually lying there somewhere just waiting for the conditions to germinate. [...]

COWEN: How important a figure is Cleopatra in this whole history? Is it just marketing, and Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Taylor, or was she really at the center of what was happening? Did she matter?

Cultural Evolution and (Tyler Cowen’s views on) History [MR 7]

While Tyler Cowen’s monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026), is about intellectual history, I didn’t sense that Cowen had any overall view of history. Rather he seems to think of it as one thing after another, which it is, during which bursts of human creativity appear at irregular intervals and mostly later than they should. I decided to quiz Cowen’s AI about that. Before I present that dialog, however, I want to comment about the concept of cognitive ranks, which I have instead of a theory of history.

The idea was incubated during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins, where I was introduced to the thinking of Jean Piaget by Mary Ainsworth. As you know, Piaget argued that children’s conceptual development happened in stages, where each stage marked the emergence of a new cognitive mechanism. I read quite a bit of Piaget and when I did so I tried to imagine how the world must seem to a child having only those capacities that Piaget was describing, operation by operation, by minute operation. At the same time I was studying perceptual and cognitive psychology which gave me other ways of thinking about how we make sense out of the “booming, buzzing confusion” – to borrow a phrase from William James. Later on, after I had finished my undergraduate education, I learned that Piaget also applied his approach to the emergence of ideas in history, as in his slender book, Genetic Epistemology. That’s what came to interest me.

In my sophomore or junior year I took a course on the Scientific Revolution, where I read Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Earlier, in my freshman year, I had taken a two-semester course in art history. And I’d taken a bunch of literature courses. I couldn’t help but notice that these otherwise different topics “crossed” in a three century span. During the 15th through 17th centuries we saw the emergence of realistic depiction based on rationalized space, the Scientific Revolution, and the origins of the novel. Then I read Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962) in a sociology class. That same period saw the conceptualization of childhood as a specific stage of life with specific needs and capacities. Was this all just coincidence or did these separate phenomena have something in common beyond time frame?

And then there was the widespread recognition that the emergence of literary had society-wide effects on culture. Similarly, we have widespread cultural changed in the transition from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Modernism appears in the arts, music, literature, and the plastic arts, and physics undergoes a major change.

With all that under my belt I came across a slender book by Walter Wiora, The Four Ages of Music (1965). In a quick survey of the worlds’ music he argues for four stages based respectively on rhythm, melody, and harmony, with the fourth based on an eclectic use of a wide variety of techniques. I read that and wondered: Perhaps everything is like that? Is that the long course of cultural evolution?

I took that with me when I went on for my Ph. D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. While I was getting my degree in the English Department, I spent a great deal of time in Linguistics studying cognitive semantics with David Hays. That work forced me to think about ordinary concepts, common sense knowledge as it is known, in great detail, comparable to the detail one learns in studying predicate calculus and symbolic logic, though of a bit different kind. But Hays was also interested in cultural evolution, so we started working on it. I worked out a version of the idea in my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” where I applied it to the evolution of narrative forms. The idea then lay dormant until Hays and picked it up again in the late 1980s, leading to the publication of our basic article, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), followed by other articles by me and by Hays; Hays also wrote a book, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks.

I think of the idea as a description motivated a certain conception of cognition. It’s descriptive because Hays and I don’t attempt to explain why this evolution happened; rather we observe that that is what has in fact happened. Our conception of cognition is, broadly speaking, constructivist, a term that has been applied to Piaget’s work. Ideas are constructed by cognitive mechanisms. Each cognitive rank draws on mechanisms not available at earlier ranks. In particular – and here I am drawing on Piaget’s conception of reflective abstraction – Rank N+1 treats the mechanisms and structures of Rank N as objects for examination and manipulation. Thus I am inclined to see order in the long-term history of ideas, an order based on the accumulation cognitive mechanisms, where Cowen tends to see adventitious emergence based on a local confluence of facilitating circumstances.

We look at the world in very different ways, which was the point of an earlier post, Welcome to Reality, Tyler; the AI’s got your number: Further Notes on Revolution, Marginal and AI [MR-3a]. I note, however, that I have no more use for Hegel and Marx than Cowen does.

And with that, here’s the dialog I had with Cowen’s AI. Note that, toward the end, I get around to asking about Girard. I didn’t have Girard in mind when I started this dialog, but, in thinking things over, I began to get a sense of why Girard would appeal to Cowen, though they’re very different kinds of thinkers. Cowen’s an empirical social scientist of the late 20th century whereas Girard is a 19th century grand theorist displaced to the middle of the 20th century.

* * * * *

What are Tyler’s views on history in general? I know he favors economic growth. But I don’t get any general sense of history from this book. It just seems to be that pinnacles of human creativity appear at unpredictable times that don’t seem to anything more than local order.

That's a perceptive gap to identify, and it's real. Tyler uses history throughout the book but doesn't have a philosophy of history in any strong sense. His historical examples — the slow development of botanical classification, geology, the Marginal Revolution itself spreading unevenly across decades — are deployed instrumentally, to illustrate why intellectual progress is non-linear and contingent. [See text: Ch.3 · The uneven diffusion of marginalist ideas as hi...] But he never steps back and asks what the overall shape of history is, whether it has direction, whether the peaks of creativity he identifies are connected by anything deeper than circumstance.

What you're left with is essentially a punctuated equilibrium model without the theory — bursts of insight separated by long plateaus, with the bursts explained by the convergence of multiple enabling conditions: the right institutions, the right communication infrastructure, the right social permission to think heterodox thoughts. [See text: Ch.3 · How enabling conditions converged for early eco...] That's not nothing, but it's also not a philosophy of history. It's pattern recognition dressed as explanation.

Tyler's deeper commitments, visible more on Marginal Revolution than in this book, lean toward a kind of progress studies framework associated with thinkers like Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen — the view that human progress is real, measurable, and has been accelerating, but is also fragile and contingent rather than inevitable. That's a Whiggish skeleton with the triumphalism removed. History goes somewhere, but it could easily have gone elsewhere, and the mechanisms are local and specific rather than grand and structural.

What's missing — and what your 1990 paper with Hays actually supplies — is any account of why complexity keeps increasing, why the peaks get higher even if their timing is unpredictable. Tyler sees the peaks. He doesn't have a theory of the underlying gradient that makes higher peaks possible over time. Your argument — that natural selection operates in an inherently complex universe, that greater differentiation yields more information without limit — would give him that gradient. History isn't just local order appearing at unpredictable times. It's local order appearing against a background of increasing universal complexity, which is itself directional even if not deterministic. Tyler has the observations. He's missing the substrate that would connect them.

Hegel and Marx

Interesting, especially in light of his extensive reading, which includes history of all kinds. History is just one thing after another. I wonder to what extent that might be a reaction against the grand theories of, say, Hegel and Marx. For that matter, does living historian offer some kind of grand theory? Well, there’s Pinker with his account of diminishing violence over time, though I know Tyler has expressed reservations about that somewhere in the MR blog.

Your instinct about Hegel and Marx is well-supported by the MR blog record. Tyler's relationship with grand historical theory is one of respectful dismissal — he's read enough to know why people find it compelling, and enough to remain unconvinced. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler on empiricism defeating all the grand -isms]

On Hegel specifically: Tyler has looked at every page of the Phenomenology of Spirit but can hardly claim to have read it, and found the Master-Slave dialectic — usually considered the core — "a waste of time" he couldn't sustain attention through. That's not a refutation, it's a temperamental rejection. His bottom line: he doesn't think most people should spend much time with Hegel. So the anti-Hegelian stance isn't really argued — it's more like an allergy.

On Marx, Tyler is more engaged and more interesting. He notes that "Smith thought in terms of marginal tradeoffs" while "Marx, above all, focused on inframarginal and systematic effects." That's actually a sharp distinction — and it maps directly onto the gap in this book. Tyler is a marginalist by temperament even when critiquing marginalism. His final verdict: "marxism, as a political program, remains dangerous nonsense" and "Marx's blind spots were enormous." But he does count Marx among the great economists. So: useful diagnostician, catastrophic prescriber.

On Pinker, you're right that Tyler has expressed reservations. He prefers a weighted average of per capita and absolute measures of violence, arguing that killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not "half as violent" if global population is twice as high — and that once you include absolute measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests. More structurally, Tyler wonders whether the distribution is better described as "long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence" — a warfare correlate to the Minsky Moment, with "great moderations" that each end with a bang. That's a genuinely different model from Pinker's, and it rhymes with your punctuated-equilibrium framing from the Hays paper.

On Enlightenment Now, Tyler's reservations go deeper: his main difference with Pinker may be that he believes there is "a certain amount of irreducible 'irrationality' in people, and it has to be 'put somewhere,' into some doctrine or belief system." That's not a Whig objection — it's almost a Burkean one. Progress doesn't eliminate the irrational substrate; it just redirects it.

Here are the relevant MR posts:

1. Steven Pinker on violence (2011) Tyler's most sustained critique of Better Angels, raising the absolute vs. per capita violence distinction and the Minsky Moment analogy for warfare. The core reservations you remembered are all here.
2. Enlightenment Now, the new Steven Pinker book (2018) Tyler's numbered-list response to Pinker's follow-up book, where he pushes back on Pinker's treatment of the Counter-Enlightenment and raises the "irreducible irrationality" objection.
3. Steven Pinker on slavery and the Enlightenment (2019) Tyler calls himself an admirer of Pinker and a long-term optimist, but insists that "what is sometimes called progress does also have a dark side." A careful, specific critique of Pinker's historical claims about abolition.
4. Hegel, or Department of Yikes (2008) The definitive Tyler-on-Hegel post. Short, direct, and tells you everything you need to know about why grand dialectical theories of history don't appeal to him.
5. What is valid in Marxism? (2004) Tyler's five-point attempt to extract what's genuinely useful from Marx, including the inframarginal/systematic effects point. Worth reading alongside the book's dismissal of Marxism as a "school" that lost out to empiricism.

Game Theory, Marginalism, and Culture [MR-Aux]

This is another post that’s a byproduct of my examination of Tyler Cowen’s recent monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. I was pursuing that idea that, while marginalism doesn’t present itself as being about human psychology, it is very much about psychology. So, what about game theory? It’s about human psychology as well, though its mathematical form makes it easy to bracket that out. So I queried Cowen’s AI about that. The conversation ended up with a discussion of one of my favorite literary texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is structured around a very peculiar game, the beheading game. [FWIW, here’s a post from 2024 where I investigate ChatGPT’s understanding of the beheading game.]

* * * * *

I’m curious. Von Neumann invented game theory in the middle of the 20th century and it became important in economics, among other places. What can you tell me about its use in marginalist thinking. I don’t need a long answer. I’m just wondering if it’s one formal analytic tool among many. Is it used frequently, rarely, not at all? It’s a peculiar question. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. I mean, if you find that it’s taking time (to search through articles, etc.), that in itself is an indicator. On the other hand, if someone has written a textbook with a title like, Game Theory as a Tool for Marginalist Analysis, that’s a rather different kind of indicator.

My knowledge here is sufficient that I don't need to search.

Game theory and marginalism are related but distinct frameworks within economics, and the relationship between them is more one of coexistence and occasional overlap than integration. Marginalism asks what happens at the margin for an individual agent facing given prices and quantities. Game theory asks what happens when agents' outcomes depend on each other's choices. They share the rational agent assumption and optimization logic, but they're answering different questions.

Game theory became central to microeconomics in the latter half of the 20th century — particularly through Nash equilibrium and its elaborations — but it didn't so much extend marginalism as partially displace it in certain domains. Industrial organization, auction theory, mechanism design — these are game-theoretic through and through, and marginal analysis is less central there than it is in competitive market analysis where price-taking behavior makes the game-theoretic complications disappear.

There's no textbook of the kind you hypothesize, as far as I know. The two frameworks are taught in the same curriculum and occasionally combined — a Nash equilibrium can be characterized by first-order conditions that look marginal — but game theory is generally understood as a distinct toolkit that becomes relevant when strategic interaction matters, rather than as an extension of marginalist reasoning.

Cowen, interestingly, doesn't seem to foreground game theory in his account of marginalism's rise and possible decline. Which may itself be telling — it suggests he sees them as parallel developments rather than game theory being a chapter in the marginalist story.

So: one important formal tool among several, with genuine but limited overlap, not deeply integrated.

Hollywood Economics and community formation

That’s interesting. There are linguists, such as William Croft, who talk about how the meaning of words is negotiated in each conversation. They talk of game theory, though I don’t off hand know whether or not they make formal use of it. But then there’s Robert De Vany, Hollywood Economics, which I tend to think of as being about how cultural objects are shared in a community. That’s not De Vany’s framing. He’s interested in the fact that we can’t predict how a film will do until we release it into the (cultural) marketplace, which makes it a very risky kind of investment. Note that De Vany is only talking about theatrical release. He says nothing about subsequent release on videotape and the book was written long before some movies are released directly to online streaming.

What he finds (by tracking box-office receipts), briefly, is that most movies disappear from view shortly after they’re released. They do not even breakeven much less earn a profit. But a few will have “legs” and become profitable. And among those, a very few will become so-called “blockbusters.” FWIW, I believe Spielberg’s “Jaws” is generally regarded as the first blockbuster.

I once did a thought experiment where I imagined an arena in which only one movie was available. Everyone would watch it because that’s all there is. Another somewhat different movie is released into the arena. Perhaps everyone will watch it as well, because they’re tired of the first one. So a third, somewhat different from the first two, is released, then a fourth. What I had in the back of my mind is that to some extent people use these kinds of cultural products as a way of forming communities. For that to work, however, there has to be enough variety available in the market place. When a movie is release, it is, in effect, looking for a community to adopt it.

That strikes me as a kind of marginalist analysis. What we’re trading in is a very complex kind of product, in this case a movie. But it could be a novel, or a song, or a painting, whatever.

Your thought experiment is doing something quite precise, and I think you're right that it has a marginalist structure — but it's extending marginalism into territory where the standard framework strains.

Where the marginalist structure is visible

The standard marginalist question applied to cultural goods would be: given how many movies a person has already seen, what is the marginal value of one more? That's a real question and De Vany's framework touches it. But your thought experiment is asking something different and more interesting: given the existing cultural landscape, what is the marginal value of a new movie to a community rather than an individual? That's a collective marginal value, which is much harder to specify and measure.

The "legs" phenomenon is the empirical signature of this. A movie with legs isn't just satisfying individual preferences at the margin — it's finding and consolidating a community, becoming the shared object that a group of people use to recognize each other and talk to each other. The box office receipts are measuring something that looks like individual ticket purchases but is actually a social cascade — De Vany's word-of-mouth mechanism is precisely the process by which a movie becomes a community object rather than just a consumer product.

Where standard marginalism breaks down

Standard marginalist analysis assumes that the value of a good to one consumer is independent of its value to others, or at least that the interdependencies can be handled through price. Cultural goods violate this assumption fundamentally. The value of having seen a blockbuster is partly constituted by the fact that millions of others have seen it too — you can talk about it, share references, participate in a cultural conversation. This is a network effect, and network effects are notoriously resistant to marginalist treatment because the value function isn't defined over individual consumption units in isolation.

Your arena thought experiment isolates this precisely. In a one-movie arena, everyone watches it not because it maximally satisfies their individual preferences but because it's the only available basis for cultural community. As variety increases, something like genuine preference matching becomes possible — different communities coalesce around different objects. But the matching process isn't driven by individual marginal utility in the standard sense. It's driven by a social search process in which movies and communities are simultaneously finding each other.

The De Vany connection to power laws

What De Vany finds — most movies disappear, a few have legs, a very few become blockbusters — is a power law distribution, and power laws are the empirical signature of cascade processes rather than equilibrium processes. In a marginalist equilibrium you'd expect something more like a normal distribution of returns — some variation around a mean, determined by how well each product matches the distribution of individual preferences. The power law says something different: small initial differences get amplified by social dynamics into enormous differences in outcome. The blockbuster isn't just a movie that more people happened to prefer. It's a movie that got caught in a self-reinforcing cascade of community adoption.

This connects to Arthur De Vany's broader interest in complexity economics, which is itself a challenge to standard marginalist equilibrium thinking. The cultural marketplace isn't clearing to an equilibrium — it's generating a dynamic pattern in which winner-take-most outcomes emerge from processes that are in principle unpredictable from the properties of the product alone. Which is exactly De Vany's point about risk: you can't know in advance which movie will trigger the cascade.

Your community-formation framing

What your framing adds, which I think is genuinely beyond De Vany's own framing, is the functional account of why cultural goods have this cascade structure in the first place. It's not arbitrary or merely a consequence of marketing and distribution. It reflects something about what cultural goods are for — they're instruments of community formation, shared objects that allow people to recognize membership and conduct the ongoing conversation of a community. That functional role creates the demand for coordination — everyone in a community needs to have seen the same movie, heard the same song, read the same novel, for it to do its community-forming work. And coordination demand is precisely what generates cascades and power laws.

This also explains the variety requirement your thought experiment identifies. A single cultural object can serve as the basis for one kind of community. A rich cultural marketplace allows many communities to form simultaneously around different objects — which is the cultural analog of biodiversity, and probably has similar functional importance for the health of the overall system. The blockbuster and the art house film aren't competing for the same audience in the way that two brands of the same commodity compete. They're seeding different communities, which can coexist because community membership isn't zero-sum in the way that consumption of a rival good is.

So yes — marginalist in structure, but requiring an extension of marginalism into social dynamics, network effects, and community formation that the standard framework wasn't designed to handle. It's perhaps another case where the Rank 3 tool is real and useful but the phenomenon being analyzed has a Rank 4 structure — one where the individual unit of analysis (the consumer, the ticket purchase) is embedded in a dynamic system whose behavior can't be read off from the units alone.

Christianity and children

I’ve been working on a new post for 3 Quarks Daily, which will be out next week some time. Working title: “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” That got me wondering: Does Christianity place a special emphasis on children? I put the question to Claude 4.6 Sonata. Our conversation is below the asterisks.

* * * * *

I have the impression that Christianity places a great deal of emphasis on children. Is that true, or just a reflection of the fact that my most sustained contact with explicit Christian ideation came in Sunday school?

Both things are probably true simultaneously — Sunday school did shape your sense of it, and Christianity does have a genuine and deep emphasis on children, though it's more complicated and multifaceted than the Sunday school version suggests.

The textual basis is real and striking. The Synoptic Gospels all contain the moment where Jesus rebukes his disciples for turning children away — "Let the little children come to me" — and then makes the extraordinary claim that one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That's not just sentiment about children's innocence; it's a theological inversion. The child is the model for the adult, not the other way around. Spiritual maturity means recovering something prior to socialization, prior to worldliness.

There's also the Incarnation itself — God entering the world specifically as a baby, helpless, in a manger. The Baby Jesus isn't incidental to Christian theology; the vulnerability and particularity of infancy is theologically loaded. God chose that.

But — and this is worth noting — the heavy institutional emphasis on children's religious education, Sunday schools, confirmation classes, is actually a relatively modern development, largely 19th century Protestant. The Sunday school movement was partly a response to industrialization and child labor, as much a social reform project as a theological one.

So your childhood cosmology — the universe as a movie for the Baby Jesus — was formed in that particular modern institutional context, but it reached back and touched something genuinely ancient and theologically serious. Which is perhaps another instance of the process you're describing: becoming what you were always going to become.

Is this more the case with Christianity than with other world religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism?

It's a genuinely interesting comparative question, and the short answer is: yes, Christianity is somewhat unusual in making a child — and specifically an infant — theologically central in a way the others don't.

Judaism centers children in practice and transmission — the Passover Seder is explicitly structured around children asking questions, and circumcision marks male children at eight days old. Children are crucial as the carriers of the covenant forward in time. But no child figure is theologically central the way the Baby Jesus is. The emphasis is on children as the future of the people, not as a spiritual model or divine incarnation.

Islam similarly emphasizes children as trust from God, and there are strong ethical obligations around their care and education. But again, no child is theologically central. Muhammad was a prophet who matters as an adult. The religion's founding moment is a grown man receiving revelation.

Hinduism is interesting because Krishna is worshipped as a child — the infant Krishna, the mischievous boy Krishna stealing butter — and there's genuine theological weight to that child figure, not entirely unlike the Baby Jesus. This may be the closest parallel. But Hinduism's theological diversity is so vast that it's hard to generalize.

Buddhism places essentially no theological emphasis on children or childhood. The Buddha's story begins with his renunciation of family life. Children appear ethically — as beings deserving compassion — but not theologically.

So Christianity's specific move — God becoming a helpless infant as the central salvific act — is fairly distinctive. The vulnerability of the Baby Jesus, his need for Mary's care, his arrival among the poor and marginal, carries theological freight that the other traditions don't quite replicate. Which makes your childhood cosmology — the universe staged for that specific infant — a more theologically precise intuition than it might first appear.

Christianity and linear history

And then there’s the idea that Christianity places a unique emphasis on linear history, from the birth of Christ in the past to his return in the future. To be sure, that’s derived from the Jewish concept of the messiah, but Judaism never had an historical messiah, nor did Islam, though I believe it accepts Jesus as a prophet.

Yes, that's right on all counts. Islam does accept Jesus — Isa — as a prophet, one of the greatest, but not divine and not the final prophet, that being Muhammad. Islam also has its own eschatology, including the return of Jesus at the end of times, which is interesting — he returns in the Islamic framework too, but as a sign of the Last Day rather than as the returning Lord.

But your larger point about linear history is important and well-taken. Christianity inherits the Jewish sense of history as purposive — moving somewhere, meaning something — but then anchors it with an actual historical event at the center. The Incarnation is the hinge of history. Everything before points toward it, everything after flows from it. That's what gave Western civilization its peculiarly intense relationship with historical time, with progress, with the idea that things are going somewhere.

This is actually Karl Löwith's argument in Meaning in History — that modern secular ideologies like Marxism and liberalism are essentially secularized versions of Christian eschatology. The proletarian revolution or the end of history replace the Second Coming, but the narrative structure — fallen past, redemptive event, fulfilled future — is the same skeleton.

Which brings your cosmology full circle in an interesting way. Your secular mysticism, coupled with Prigogine and Tyson, preserves the directionality of Christian historical consciousness — the universe moving toward complexity, toward mind, toward something — while dissolving the supernatural scaffolding.

The movie has a plot. It just doesn't need a projectionist.

Centuries of Childhood

Oh, and I just remembered what got me thinking about Christianity and children. One book that influenced me a great deal as an undergraduate was Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood. The idea that childhood is conceived of as a specific stage in human maturation, that children aren’t conceived of as little adults but with reduced capacities, that was invented in early modern Europe. That’s one of the books that got me thinking about the ranks idea. In roughly the same two centuries or so we had, 1) a revolution in art, 2) the scientific revolution, 3) the invention of childhood, and 4) the emergence of the novel.

That's a remarkable constellation, and the fact that they cluster in the same two or three centuries is itself a datum that demands explanation. It's not obvious that they're connected, but once you see them together you can't unsee it.

Ariès's argument is that before early modern Europe, children were treated as small adults — integrated into adult life, adult work, adult space — as soon as they were physically capable. The emergence of childhood as a protected, distinct developmental stage, with its own spaces, its own literature, its own pedagogy, required a new conception of the human person as something that unfolds through time, that passes through qualitatively distinct stages, that requires cultivation rather than just initiation.

The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/164963582/The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority_A_Working_Paper 

SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6352618 

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401591370_The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority

Abstract: This working paper examines the intellectual status of literary criticism as an academic discipline in the United States. Beginning from a playful prompt inspired by Tyler Cowen’s book GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?, the essay initially sets out to identify the “greatest” literary critics. Very quickly, however, the exercise reveals a deeper problem: unlike economics, the population of figures who count as literary critics is difficult to define, and the criteria by which they might be evaluated are far from clear. The project therefore shifts from ranking critics to examining the boundaries, origins, and intellectual ambitions of the discipline itself.

The essay traces the emergence of contemporary academic literary criticism to the mid-twentieth century, using Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry as a marker of the New Criticism’s institutional consolidation within American universities. From there it examines the crisis that arose in the 1960s when disagreements about interpretation raised doubts about whether literary criticism could claim the status of cumulative knowledge. The 1966 Johns Hopkins structuralism conference serves as a pivotal moment, bringing figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida into the orbit of literary studies and helping to catalyze the rise of “Theory”—a broad set of interpretive approaches drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and other disciplines.

Through discussions of figures such as Coleridge, Frye, Girard, Derrida, and Harold Bloom, the essay explores competing conceptions of literary criticism: as pedagogy, as cultural guardianship, as theoretical inquiry, and as personal commentary on great works. Bloom’s eventual retreat from academic criticism toward a more public and personal mode of literary judgment is treated as emblematic of the discipline’s ongoing uncertainty about its intellectual foundations.

Contents

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline 3
1. The search for GOAT Literary Critics 6
2. A discipline is founded: Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge 23
3. Structuralism and its aftermath: Girard, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida 32
Character in the Age of Adam Smith [GOAT economist], an interlude 56
4. What’s up with the Bard? [Bloom, Cowen, and Girard] 59
Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies 71
5. Harold Bloom, the one and only 73
Appendix 1: The Chatbots Comment on this Essay 94
Appendix 2: Commentary on the Profession 98
Appendix 3: Open Letters about Literary Criticism 100
Appendix 4: Naturalist Literary Criticism 101

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline

I started this project on a whim, as I often do. Tyler Cowen had just announced his book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter, and I thought: Why don’t I do the greatest literary critics? And that’s what I set out to do.

But I had no plan, just a vague intention. When I began this project I had no idea, for example, that I would end it with a discussion of Harold Bloom, giving him more attention than any other critic or that I would deposit a longish piece about Susan Sontag in the middle of my Bloom discussion. No, I didn’t plan that, I hadn’t even anticipating discussing Bloom at all.

Once I got started, however, whole thing evolved more or less organically and is something of an opportunistic hodge-podge of various kinds of intellectual materials, prose that I’ve written (the biggest single chunk of material), lists from Wikipedia, queries to ChatGPT, charts from Google Ngrams, and topic model charts. Why don’t we agree that its form is an exercise in avant-garde criticism intended to mime the jagged and fuzzy state of the discipline?

This diagram depicts the argument that has emerged during this exercise. Read it as moving from the past, at the left, on through the present to the future, at the right:

I locate the beginning of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism in the mid-20th century pedagogical anthology, Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warran, which I discuss in some detail later in this essay. Commentary on literature shades off into the past back through Samuel Johnson in the modern world and through Aristotle in the ancient world, and both classical and vernacular literature was studied in the nineteenth-century German universities that provided the model on which American universities were established, but the contemporary academic study of literature is based on interpretive methods and ideas that crystalized in the middle of the 20th century. Brooks & Warren are a convenient marker of that activity. It was known as the New Criticism, a term still in use for a certain body of work.

By the 1960s, however, that interpretive activity had become problematic. Some critics became bothered by the fact that different critics arrived at different interpretive conclusions about the same texts. “How,” they came to wonder, “how can we count this as knowledge if we can’t agree on meanings?” And so, some scholars at Johns Hopkins invited a group of Continental thinkers, mostly French, but not entirely, to a symposium in the Fall of 1966. The symposium was organized around structuralism, an interdisciplinary movement of the human sciences that emerged in Europe at the middle of the century. A French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss was the nominal head of the movement. He was invited to the symposium, but couldn’t make it. As it turned out, however, the star of the conference was a young philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who skewered Lévi-Strauss with his contribution, thus sowing the first seeds of poststructuralism. Note that neither of them is a literary critic, but they have had as much if note more influence on literary criticism than anyone who was and is primarily a literary critic.

And so I have indicated them at the middle of the diagram, with one of them pointed toward the future and the other pointing toward the past. The direction of those arrows reflects my judgment, but it should by no means be considered as reflective of the discipline. The discipline would come to reject Lévi-Strauss, but an increasingly large portion of it would come to at least accept, if not embrace, the insights of Derrida. I have a great deal to say about that later in the essay. And I want to say a bit about my own position in this – I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the French landed – just a bit later in this introduction.

Derrida’s method, deconstruction (a word he coined), opened the floodgates to a variety of interpretive methods that came to be collectively known as “Theory,” with a capital “T.” Theory is the application of some approach to the study of the human mind and/or society that is used as a vehicle for interpreting literary (and other) texts. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were the first through the door followed by feminism, African-American studies and so on and so forth.

Understandably many (older) critics resisted these new dispensations, none more forcefully than Harold Bloom. While he spent a few years trying to go along with the program, during the 1980s he broke ranks and not only abandoned poststructuralism but he pretty much abandoned academic literary criticism in favor of addressing himself to the general educated public in through edited collections and a variety of books, including one on American religion (which I’ve read), and big fat books on The Western Canon and Shakespeare. I’ve given over the last 20 pages of this essay (excluding the appendices) to Bloom, with a diversion into Susan Sontag, though it becomes 35 pages if you include the immediately preceding remarks on Shakespeare’s position in the canon, a reasonable inclusion given that Bloom is Bardolator in Chief.

That accounts for the position of Bloom on the chart, right of center at the apex of a triangle trailing off into the past. He abandoned the modes of thought ushered in by Brooks & Warren and retreated into a more personalistic mode of criticism, one that allowed him to luxuriate in his own opinions as amplified through his tremendous, but ultimately narrow, erudition. Bloom became an empire unto himself.

As for me, as I said, I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the structuralism conference took place. I didn’t attend it, didn’t even know it was happening, but I was introduced to structuralism and semiotics by Dr. Richard Macksey, a book-collecting polymath who did much of the organizational groundwork for the conference. Without going into detail, I decided that the natural progression from Lévi-Strauss was into cognitive science and computational semantics, which I pursued with David Hays in linguistics while getting a Ph.D. in English at The State University of New York at Buffalo. And that effectively took me well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism.

While I have continued my interest in literature and have written both practical commentary and theoretical and methodological studies, I have also pursued other intellectual interests – cultural evolution, cognitive science, music, film, graffiti, this and that. The upshot is that I am not as widely and deeply read in literary criticism as I would have been had I decided to mind my Ps and Qs for the last 40 years.

That’s an obvious disqualification for writing a longish essay intended to do for literary critics what Tyler Cowen did for economists, identify the GOATs (Greatest of All Time). But that, as you will quickly see, that’s not what I ended up doing. Rather, I used that objective as a vehicle for examining the origins and boundaries of the academic discipline of literary criticism, which I have depicted in that diagram. And that, I would argue, is a task for which my outsider status suits me well. I can see what’s going on in a way that those in the middle of it cannot.

You be the judge.

Have at it.

* * * * *

Note: I’ve included appendices listing various articles I’ve written about the profession. The last one is about the opportunities opened up by computing, both as a conceptual model and a practical tool.

Hon. Martha A. Mills (ret): Lawyer, Activist, Judge

Martha Mills is a friend of mine. She took a course on the history of technology taught by my teacher, David Hays, and became fascinated by his ideas. That's how I know here. I published a review of her 2015 book, Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois, in 3 Quarks Daily in 2016.

Here's a short professional biography on the website of the American College of Trial Lawyers:

Mills was appointed in 1995 by the Illinois Supreme Court to serve as a Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County. She served for two years, primarily in the Juvenile Justice, Child Protection Division. She was recalled in 2007, and was Supervising Judge of the Parentage and Child Support Court until December of 2012. Under her guidance, the court started a highly successful pilot restorative justice program with the help of Elizabeth J. Vastine and Peter Newman. Since her retirement she has continued to to teach and offer services in community building and restorative practices.

After law school, Mills was the first woman lawyer with White & Case in NYC. She then joined the staff of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Mississippi where she tried many cases, civil and criminal, getting the first jury verdict in Mississippi since Reconstruction for over a million dollars on behalf of the estate of an African American man murdered by the Klan. She was Chief Counsel of the Lawyers Committee Office in Cairo, IL prior to moving back to Chicago. She has practiced law in Illinois since 1969, both as a trial and appellate attorney. The American Bar Association in 2013 published her book: Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois.

Judge Mills was a trial lawyer for more than forty years. She is licensed to practice in the states of Illinois, New York and Mississippi, and in numerous federal courts. She has argued cases in the Mississippi, Illinois and U.S. Supreme Courts. She has not only arbitrated, mediated and facilitated many cases and conflicts, but also taught others to do so. As founder and Executive Director of Transforming Communities, a not-for-profit corporation, she engaged consulting, practice, education and training in restorative justice from 1996-2007, as well as work in violence prevention and intervention.

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel, who is clueless

Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, NYtimes, June 26, 2025.

They start out with economic stagnation:

Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.

I always made an exception for the world of bits, so we had computers and software and internet and mobile internet. And then the last 10 to 15 years you had crypto and the A.I. revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big. But the question is: Is it enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation?

The conversation goes on in that vein, and then:

Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

Two things: 1) Back in the 1990s my friend Abbe Mowshowitz was talking about virtual feudalism, which is where he saw us headed. He hired me to ghost an article about that but, alas, he was unable to publish it, so I eventually posted it as one of my working papers: Virtual Feudalism in the Twenty-First Century.

2) I sorta' kinda' agree with Thiel about being stuck. But I think about history in a very different way. I think in terms of cultural evolution, specifically, the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I sketched out back in the 1990s. [Here's a brief guide: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.] At the moment we're stuck "treading water," as it were, in Rank 4, but haven't made it to the next level. Just what that next level will turn out to be, that's not at all clear, & that's where I talk about the Fourth Arena, thus: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. When I say that Thiel is clueless, that's what I'm talking about; he has no sense of cultural evolution, of a succession of cognitive architectures, or the mind itself, taken collectively, as a driving force in history.

Back to the conversation, and Homo economicus:

Douthat: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

Thiel: They may rebel. Or maybe our institutions don’t work, since all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Douthat: Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Is that a law of nature, or a contingent matter of historical circumstance?

On the nexus of Silicon Valley, stagnation, and Trump:

Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.

Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.

I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted.

Douthat: And Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted ——

Thiel: On the stagnation question.

Douthat: Right. But a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024 — including, obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

Thiel: Yeah. And this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.

And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.

On Mars, AI, and progress, with a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of DeepMind):

Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.

And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?

Douthat: What does Mars mean?

Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?

Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Douthat: So the woke A.I., artificial intelligence, seems like, one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to the place where there’s been remarkable progress — surprising, to many people, progress.

It’s also the place — we were just talking about politics — where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships. So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.

And you are an investor in A.I. What do you think you’re investing in?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it. There are risks with it. Obviously, there are dangers with this technology. But there are also ——

Now that was interesting, very interesting, Mars as a political project. Hmmmm. And then they launch into a conversation about smart people:

Thiel: But I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments. And if the A.I. is just conventionally smart, if we define wokeness — again, wokeness is too ideological — but if you just define it as conformist, maybe that’s not the smartness that’s going to make a difference.

I note that smart people aren't going to get anywhere if they're working with the wrong ideas. There were a lot of smart people in the 17th century, but they didn't have radios and airplanes. It's not that they weren't smart enough, rather, the intellectual foundations weren't there for them to work from.

And then they veer off into transhumanism and Christianity and cryonics and and ... the Antichrist? That's where I get off the bus, but you might find it interesting.