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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth
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tyler.com [Music] I'm here today with the great Lissa mcf farker she is a staff writer for the New Yorker considered by many to write the very best and most interesting profiles of anyone in the business she has a very
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well-known book called strangers drowning the subtitle is impossible idealism drastic choices and the urge to help it's about extreme altruists and she's now working on a book on people's decisions whether or not to leave their
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Hometown Lissa welcome thank you so much for having me here first set of questions about altruism and extreme altruists are very virtuous people easy to dislike not to me but to many others and this was actually news to me when I
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embarked on the book I went into it wanting to Simply understand the drive and the motives of people who could sustain the kind of extraordinary sense of Duty and altruism that some of us have some of the time moved Maybe by a poignant photograph or somebody in front of us but you know can't sustain uh without those cues in front of us and but there's other people who who can and I wanted to know what made them tick but
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in uh my first foray into this field I was writing about people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger and I discovered I was talking to people and about the people I was meeting and they would say those those people surely are
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all mentally ill right or they have some problem or they are probably very very censorious or judgmental it was very surprising to me I understand of course that not everyone is going to be an extreme altruist but I
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didn't realize the extent of the hostility and suspicion of them until I started writing about them and I became fascinated by that it became a major part of the book trying to figure out where this comes from because I don't think it's exists in every time and place in the same way and where where does it come from the hostility to extreme altruists is it people feeling Envy or that they don't measure up I think it comes from many many sources
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and um I tried to unravel some of them in the book I think it comes from a sense that is trickled down from many academic disciplines that humans are fundamentally egotistical and therefore that in so far as they are not it must
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be some kind of pathology or perversion psych analysis is especially suspicious uh in that regard but it also comes from so many areas of popular culture I mean for instance one of the things that I became really intrigued by was alanon um
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because alanon as you may know is uh the the organization founded in the 50s by the spouses and partners and family members of Alcoholics and it was designed to help people understand that trying to prevent someone from stopping
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to trying to help someone stop drinking which used to be an unambiguously great thing to do it's the thing that longsuffering virtuous spouses did was actually not just unlikely to be helpful but could be part was part of the same
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addictive behavior as drinking itself as alcoholism itself it was a sickness and one that needed to be gotten over and I think this uh notion that trying to help people sacrificing yourself to help people was a sickness became very widespread um especially in the 70s and 80s under the better known term codependency and I think it's it's part of our now unconscious culture the way we look at altruists when we hear about
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them many people think first are they sick if we think of extreme altruists in terms of personality theory are they especially high or low in neuroticism oh gosh I don't know I mean so you met a lot of them right you I have met a lot of them I think they're fantastic I mean you know of course there are annoying uh altruists just like they're annoying golfers and annoying dentists but I think I wrote about people I 100% wholeheartedly
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admired but I'll say one thing so I read a lot of uh psychological and psychiatric articles about altruism and nearly all of them as as I've suggested pathologized altruism in some way and I became quite annoyed by this and I read
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one article that described altruists in terms of parentified children the idea here is that if you grow up in an in a household where at least one of your parents is not functioning as a parent either because they are mentally ill or
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they are an alcoholic or an addict or for some reason they're not functioning as a parent obviously in many cases this just messes the child up but in some cases the child responds by trying to fix the situation they may take care of their parent they may try to be a perfect student they may take care of their younger siblings they try to fix their family and the idea is that this parentified child the child who takes on
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the role of a parent as as a young person may grow up to have an outsized desire to fix the world a sense of responsibility for the world in the way that they felt responsible for their family as a child and I thought about
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the people I'd met who I'd interviewed for my book and not all of them but lots of them had that circumstance one of their parents was either an alcoholic or is mentally ill or was an addict of some kind so I thought okay maybe there is
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something to this particular Theory however however I do want to push back on the idea that this therefore makes somebody pathological because just because your altruistic Tendencies may not be free in the sense of freely
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chosen devoid of any cause from your childhood does not mean that they are wrong so imagine here's here's what I try to persuade people who tell me that all altruists are mentally ill I say think about think about a kid who grows
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up with two lovely parents who try to persuade that taking care of other people is the right thing to do and because of that upbringing they also grow up to feel an outside sense of Duty and responsibility to take care of other people in the world they are no more free than the person who came upon such a sense of Duty because of their bad parents so is one more free or worse than the other could the same person be both say a
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Rwandan killer in the 1990s and and an extreme altruist or is that a contradiction my husband actually wrote about the rwana genocide and he um he has sometimes explained that to some of the killers it felt like a community
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building exercise it was a way to support and cohere their own people you know no I don't believe that they could be extreme altruists because I think that genocide is wrong and I don't think that's a very controversial position
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however it is certainly true that people who do very terrible things can consider themselves extreme altruists and throughout history as we know it's very obvious that people have sacrificed themselves as often for terrible causes as for good I'm sure you know of Bernard Williams and his concept of moral luck that how good you are May in some cases be a function of how lucky you become that you make an initial investment and
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you could end up as a kind of nobody with no impact or luck could be in your favor and you could end up doing the world a great amount of good or possibly a great amount of harm how do you see the moral luck notion as applying to
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extreme altruists or for that matter Rand and Killers well I mean his his classic example I love Bernard Williams I think he's a beautiful beautiful writer and a very interesting thinker and his classic example in this regard
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was Goa um here is a painter who abandons his wife and I believe children to go to Tahiti and paint and find his artistic Muse fortunately for for go he had the moral luck to be an excellent painter so everyone forgives him they
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say how wonderful that he that he did what he needed to do to make this extraordinary art what if he'd been a terrible painter that wouldn't have made a moral difference but it would have made a difference to how we would judge
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him so in that sense he had moral luck with extreme altruists you know there's this this sense that I think most of us have that um morality should be judged by motive and therefore it is to some extent divorced from luck that's why Bernard Williams's idea of moral luck was so strange and so startling to many people the idea is if you try to do good that's what counts and whether you are able to to in fact do good is is a
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result of luck of various kinds like your own uh ability uh the situation in the world that you find yourself in all kinds of things like that but it's more ancient Notions of of morality find this Paradox less strange because they
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believe that you can you can hold someone to account for how wise they are and how able they are to judge uh their actions and successfully anticipate whether they will produce wrong or not and so you can blame someone for having
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a terrible idea of the good that is part of how you judge them and therefore even though it may be because you grow up in a society where terrible ideas of the good are predominant and you somewhat haessly find yourself swept along in them you're still held to account in your profile of n Chomsky he seems to say that motives shouldn't matter at all for assessing political action yeah and uh I don't I don't agree with that um I
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mean I think you know he he likes to judge only on the results but I think because the world is as it is we can never fully anticipate the consequences of our actions the important thing is to try our best to do so and not to be feckless about ignoring likely consequences but to ignore the difference between someone who is trying to do something that is genuinely good and someone who is doing the opposite seems to me deeply wrong if you're an
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extreme altruist are you too subject to manipulation by others if you care so much about so many other people and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost does this mean that you the extreme altruist you just
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go through life being manipulated you you know it's funny you should say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme ALU I you know I I don't want to call them extreme altruists I mean I think they're they're
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people with a very strong sense of Duty and one of the things that they have in common they the people I met had were very very different from each other one thing they had in common is they really really barely cared about what other people thought they had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos and at worst uh you know dangerous dangerous megal and so they were unconventional in their
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degree of Duty but also in many other ways so they didn't care at all what people thought about anything they did like how they dressed or things like that I don't mean they didn't care about anything about what people thought because obviously obviously they cared about making other people's lives better but yes in terms of of of opinions of themselves they were much less sensitive to that than most of us so for instance
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there was a couple who the bed of who now live in Philadelphia who um adopted 20 special needs kids in addition to the two bio biological kids that they had and that was obviously an unconventional thing to do but it wasn't
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the only one so Mr bedau Hector bedau uh stayed home he was the one who changed the diapers he made the breakfasts he made the lunches he cooked the dinners for the most part and sue his wife was the one who went out to work and earned
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the money to keep the household going and this was a long time ago I mean they started out life together I think oh my gosh I'm forgetting it was many decades ago I'm forgetting the exact year that they got married and they just didn't care that other people thought they were weird because they knew that was the price of doing what they thought was right to do is Paul Bloom right to suggest that empathy is overrated um I I love his book and I
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think you know I I mean he uh gave the book an especially provocative title for obvious reasons um I don't think he thinks that empathy is useless but I do agree with him that uh people could do a lot more good if they didn't rely solely on impulse and emotional attachment to issues that may be there just because they've heard of them as opposed to trying to do research trying to figure out how they really can do the most good
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with the resources that they're willing to give um and I think organizations like givewell uh which do research into various Charities and show you uh which Charities are more likely to succeed at their missions than others are incredibly helpful what's the best argument against what's called effective altruism oh gosh everything has to become a calculation well no I mean effective altruism is essentially a utilitarian Doctrine and I think in
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principle there are far fewer objections than there are in practice in practice I've talked to many many effective altruists over the years that the movement um has been in existence it was more or less founded in 2009 by the Oxford
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philosopher Toby ORD and I think in principle if you say well you you you effective altruists don't pay enough attention to politics to governmental institutions to um human rights to what people say they want which is as often
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uh equality as material well-being they will say well there's nothing in our philosophy that that rejects those things if you know we're we're for for well-being of whatever form it takes and you know if you convince me that going
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into politics is a better thing to do than going into banking I I'd be happy to do that so they can they can in principle avoid the the traps that in fact I think are preventing um effective altruists from being as effective as
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they should be because in practice it's very difficult to resist a shortterm shorer bet in terms of doing good so if you can spend a small amount of money and buy deworming medicine that will cure a child of of worms and enable him her her to go back to school or if you can buy a bedet that will prevent a family from getting malaria that those are such obvious short-term immediate Goods that it's hard to resist them and
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it's hard to take the gambles and take the risks of investing in less certain means of promoting welfare like lobbying in for political change uh like investing in institutions that I think are obviously extremely important and longer term more important than immediate material gains do you agree with step Pinker that in the long run we're becoming more moral I have to confess I have not read um his most recent book so I don't feel
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equipped to talk about but the basic claim people are becoming better and more altruistic over time true or false I just don't know I mean you know what seems to be true is that in in one very narrow sense of morality um we are
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becoming concerned about A Wider Circle of creatures than we were before um so whereas three centuries ago let's say very few people cared about the well-being of slaves very few people cared about the well-being of animals
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very few people cared about the well-being of really anyone outside their own Community however they defined it maybe by their church or their Village or whatever and now through a combination of discussion and Technology
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people have learned to care about more people does that make us more moral I think that's an incredibly complex question that I'm not equipped to answer you've argued that there are quite few ambitiously good characters in fiction
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is that also true for genre fiction no I'm so glad you asked that I think that um science fiction is full of heroic characters so romances um I think this is one of the things I concluded that the absence of unambiguously altruistic
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heroic characters is one of almost one of the things that marks highbrow fiction as such and I think well of course there are many many exceptions and there are heroes in higher brow fiction I think over the past 100 years
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it has become noticeable that that genre fiction is filled with far more heroism than Higher Culture and it's almost it's such a noticeable pattern that it's almost as though there is something pushing against uh that kind of
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character I mean when I when I started talking about this with people I talked about this first with a novelist who Shar shared a fellowship with me so I saw him every day and I said what is wrong with you novelists why why don't
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you write about heroic characters who are moved by by a sense of moral duty because I found these people fascinating and that's one of the reasons I wrote my book is it was almost an advertisement to novelists you should write about these people they're not simple they're not they're they're complex and fascinating and he he gave me this look of total contempt like I had asked him to write about you know bunnies or
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butterflies and I found that this was a feeling that many fiction writers shareed I talked to another friend of mine who's a novelist and he was trying to write about a heroic character and he said it was so difficult to write a
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novel um about someone who was unambiguously admirable it was almost as though the form itself was resisting but why do we make Heroes High status in the real world and relatively low status in the world of serious fiction what
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accounts for that demarcation I think that there is it's as though High status fiction as you say high culture fiction is a kind of a culture of its own with its own set of values and those values consist among many others of complexity and also a great privileging of the intimate the person in front of you the humanness of of individual humans and so it kind came to feel to me as though a love of of universal humanness was
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something that fiction had an antipathy towards it it seemed too abstract and therefore was uh not appealing that the kind of person that was always valid valed in or not always I should not say always there as I said there are exceptions but tended to be valorized in novels was the person who rejected large Universal abstractions about humans and valued instead the person in front of them the person they loved the person
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the member of their family and was not like Mrs jellby in Bleak House always looking to suffering people far away dementia if you ever succumb to Dementia or Alzheimer's would you rather rather live in a world of comforting fantasy or
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unpleasant reality or you understood your condition you know it's such a difficult thing because when I started thinking about this question I thought I would be on the side of Lies I thought I would be on the side of just just be
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kind tell people what they want to hear what's the objection um both as a person potentially being related to someone with dementia and as a a person with dementia myself but I as I came to talk to a lot of people about it I came to
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think it was much more complicated I mean first of all there are practical problems so uh it's not as though when you have dementia your cognitive decline is predictable and smooth it goes up and down you may be Lucid one morning and
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not at all the next morning you may be Lucid in the afternoon and completely bewildered in the evening and so there all these practical difficulties that if someone thinking of you as they last saw you uh lies to you and but you're Lucid at that moment you will see that lie and you will realize that you cannot trust that person and what if that person is your only living relative what if that person is your spouse what if that
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person is the nurse who takes care of you every day that is a Devastation that is an extraordinary tragedy that takes place in your life and that's a risk you're always taking by lying and then you know I I was very moved and
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convinced by the philosopher sisila Bach who wrote a book about lying several decades ago and she said you know the only issue is not the person in front of you it's very easy I think when you're taking care of someone with Dementia or
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when you have dementia to think that the only thing that matters is kindness and the only thing that matters is kindness to that person whom you're taking care of but she said you know that's not the only thing that matters because if other people hear you lying if your children hear you lying if other people in the nursing home hear you lying if people waiting in the doctor's office hear are you lying and lying evidently with a
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feeling that's the right thing to do this will spread a sense that lying is fine that lying can even be the better thing to do but once you've lost the sense that lying is rare and repellent you've lost something essential in terms of social trust and I think she's right I mean I think that that it's a very delicate thing that if we all started lying you know and also should we stop lying to people who don't have dementia
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well this is the thing that's the whole problem is that it's you know if you're going to lie to be kind to people with dementia why not lie to everybody I mean my gosh there's always nice things you could say to someone that are completely
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untrue and I'm sure we all do it on a daily basis but should we do it all the time should there not be some point at which you try to be honest rather than kind at every point because if there isn't I mean that's one of the
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fascinating things about this question is well what what is the purpose of our adherence to truth your view on how much you should be lied to if you have dementia is that the same as what you would propose for a sibling or a child someone you loved and knew with dementia right would you be consistent and apply the same standard to them that you would want for yourself I don't know I mean so I would say don't lie to me but in fact for
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others I would be more willing to lie to them than I would wish to be lied to myself well okay so that's why I uh I started asking people what what about that why couldn't people decide I mean they decide in other medical instances they have they sign Advanced directives that in principle should direct their care when they can no longer enunciate what they want and why couldn't you do that with lying why couldn't you say
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don't lie to me I'm tough I can take it or I hate lies or it's undignified or whatever reason you had for for rejecting them but you know I think the problem is that with dementia in many ways once you descend past a certain level of memory and cognitive functioning you're not really you anymore and is it fair to impose this harsh discipline of no lies on future you who actually has very little in common with a you sitting across from me
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now he's saying don't lie to me almost certainly does not hold that value anymore is very vulnerable do you want to really force that person to suffer from lies like no sorry your spouse is long dead no sorry your child has not
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come to visit you in weeks whatever truths you might want to tell them and you know quite apart from future you what about future me who is distressed by your distress should I be required to tell the truth to you and make you weep
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every single day what if I'm your your nurse in a nursing home and and I I'm made miserable every day on the job because you insisted on Truth back in 2018 going back in time has George gilder's Tech optimism been proven
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correct wrong somewhere in between what says you um I would say no um I think it's become very clear to us especially in the last year or two that there are many problems with the technologies that have been developed what's the biggest one oh
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gosh I mean where to start I mean you know I don't know that I have anything unobvious to add to what everyone already knows I mean uh privacy has been eviscerated I think do people care much about privacy they seem to give away a lot of information for free this is true this is true but I think privacy has uh social ramifications that people don't always consider so they give away a lot of information for free on Facebook
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let's say because they may imagine that on Facebook they are giving their information to their friends well but there turns out they're not they're giving their information to lots of advertisers they're giving their information to political operatives their information cannot be put back into the bottle and we now know that you know Facebook's I mean I'm just picking on Facebook because it's the lowest hangy fruit but there's there's many uh
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instances of this we now know that Facebook's mission to quote unquote connect every everybody it sounded like it was going to produce a much more pluralistic diverse world where people would have communication with people
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they couldn't connect with physically because they lived in a different place but in fact as you've noticed in complacent class uh Facebook more often does the opposite it unites people who are similar and convinces them that the
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voices in their own Echo chamber are in fact the the right ones to listen to and they they they tune in less and less to other people I mean it's in I I would like to ask you about what you consider the roots of complacency and the kind of sorting that we have both been been noticing because in some ways you would think that people moving around and going other places and moving house every few years as Americans Americans
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did more uh several decades ago would result in exposure to more kinds of people and and have a bigger sense of the world but in fact it often results in people grouping in amongst people who are very similar to them whereas if you
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have an old-fashioned small town it can result in the opposite which is to say people going to church with or socializing with people who are very different in terms of age in terms of well not conviction and going to church
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but running into people who are a different social class who do uh different things for work that kind of stuff I think a lot of people are moving just once they figure out where they really like it maybe through cheaper travel and also the internet they go there they stay there and then there's less mixing and more sorting and Mobility uh Geographic Mobility is down yes I see this problem is predating social media for the most part uh one
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hopes that most people don't live in social media bubbles I think the data actually suggests they don't so much social media don't seem to be enough of a cure their net effect seems to be to keep us at home you you have Netflix you
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have Amazon packages wonderful things but you enjoy them at home for the most part and they just keep you there exactly and that's the least mixing of all is if you stay at home so you know I think that's a very obvious uh the
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fracturing of our political dialogue is one of only the most obvious of the um align effects of Technology was George Gilder right about sexual suicide as he titled his book the notion that unmarried men would be less happy and
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maybe even headed for trouble oh gosh what do you think I I I mean I this is really a subject in which I'm not seem to show the corelations are consistent with this thesis I doubt if we can demonstrate causality but unmarried men
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earn less they're much more likely to have social problems some of that is selection well women are good at picking successful men to marry but it would be odd if none of it were causal so it's long seemed to me there was something to
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gilder's book sexual suicide that he doesn't usually get credit for well you know I mean I it does see there's I mean there's lots of data to show that people who are in long-term committed relationships whether marriage
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or or other kinds of relationships tend to be happier um so maybe there is something about humans that prefer to be in such relationships but uh whether that's more true of men than women I don't know let me ask you a few questions about profiles and writing profiles in your Hillary mantle profile you wrote quote she believes that there are no great characters without a great time ordinary times breed Ordinary People parenthesis of the sort dull
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trapped despairing who inhabit modern novels do you agree with her well you know I've always been struck by reports of people who come back from war and they say that while it was terrible it was also I mean this is not everybody obviously and not all wars but I've been struck by how many people say that there was something also great about the experience of bonding with their fellow uh soldiers of living so close to death
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that life became more extraordinary to them and more precious and people sometimes return from that kind of extreme existence to find regular existence kind of dull and and savores and I think that may be what she's talking about that there are times when humans are pushed by their circumstances to Greater Deeds I mean this is something that I I noticed when I was writing about altruism also that during wartime things that seem extreme and
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bizarre and unreasonable in ordinary times come to seem normal so if you in an ordinary times a a Kidney donor for instance uh somebody who donates their kidney to a stranger might seem like a weirdo but during wartime somebody who
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uh a soldier who sacrifices his life for that of a comrade is thought to be a hero for sure but definitely not a weirdo and somebody who leaves his family behind to serve in an army is again thought to be Noble so you're
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returning to morea luck in a sense we live in a time where most Americans don't experience War so they don't have this chance to be great and that's lock relative to their individual lives that's right but I think you know it's
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look I would never I would never Advocate I would never consider it to be lucky to be caught up in a war in any in any capacity Wars are awful but there is something about certain circumstances that push humans to be to live uh more
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extraordinary lives than do the kind of easy circumstances that some people find themselves in here not everyone by any means um and so you know the great great William James wrote an essay about hundred and some years ago called the moral equivalent of war and he advocated a kind of well it sounds odd because of the name but a kind of of of peacetime peace core because he said you know there's no need to depend on moral luck
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in effect this is not his language but we can engineer circumstances in which people are pushed to uh the same kind of self-sacrifice and heroism that they might be p to in war but we can artificially engender it and we can do
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it in a way that does not result in the horrible Bloodshed and loss and waste of War but results in something positive so he had the notion of let's send people to do work that is valuable but is really miserable and uncomfortable and
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pushes them so you know they could be working in coal mines or they could be working in working to in soup kitchens I can't remember his examples I read the essay a while ago but the idea was there's no need to and and it was interesting because the reason he thought this was necessary is he thought he said you know people who are who are pacifists always talk about how terrible war is because it's so bloody and violent and wasteful and what
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they're not getting is that people who like war or don't dislike War admit all that they know that it's very obvious um that's that's but for them it's worth it because of the stimulation as they see it uh to human greatness and so he said
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you know we pacifists we people who think war is Dreadful have to come up with some other means some other circumstance to push humans to Greatness so that war is not uh to to people who value greatness does not seem necessary
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if we do a one-on-one podcast there's no selective editing so everything you say is presented to the listeners as you say it is that a more realistic look at a person than a profile which is all about selective editing yeah possibly I mean you know I when I wrote a profile inevitably it is going to be my view of the person though I like to imagine that I am letting them speak I mean I you know I realize this is a unrealistic
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fantasy of mine but my fantasy in many cases is that I leave the room I introduce the reader to the person I'm going to write about and say here you are I've introduced you I'm G to go now and you can talk and I like to imagine
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that the the piece is in a way written by the person themselves now obviously this is this is not true and the piece is is very much inflected by my view of the person but that's what I like to think about and so although inevitably
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it's a profile is an unrealistic because subjective view of a person I like to imagine that I try to do that as little as possible what do you do to put people at ease when you're interviewing them I don't have any tricks you know it's it's funny people will say often ask me how do you get people to talk to you there's no trick involved um I think when I am interviewing someone I'm interviewing them because I really want to hear what
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they have to say and I'm incredibly interested in their life and how they describe it and how they came to have the ideas that they do and why they love them and I ask them and I think most people people just like to tell the story of
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their life and enjoy the feeling that somebody is intensely and unfeignedly interested in what they have to say and um if I'm lucky it can be a really extraordinary experience for both of us because you know obviously I don't know
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the person very well uh I just met them or even if we meet multiple times I don't know them nearly as well in many senses as their friends or their family of course that's obvious but at the same time for the most part even with people you know and love the best you don't you don't talk about your life as a whole you they don't say well why is it that you where did you start out when you were 10 what did you want to do when you
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were 10 and why did you at 20 take this path rather than that path and why did you give up on that thing that you wanted to do desperately when you were 24 and now can barely remember it how did that happen how did you come to
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forget that thing those kinds of questions and if you have a sort of two three 4H hour conversation where you go with the person prompting them over the course of their life it can be revelatory for them too because you just
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don't talk about that stuff usually you talk about what you did last weekend or what movie you've seen or what book you've read or what you had for dinner or stuff like that you don't talk about these these longer term movements in your life so at its best I'll give you an example um I was interviewing um a woman named Heather myand who is a hospice nurse in Brooklyn and she um I asked her why she chose hospice as a
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specialty and she said what I know from interviewing other hospice nurses is a common answer she said you know I don't even though working in a hospital is more prestigious I didn't like it because it was so fast-paced it was you
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know you're constantly rushing from task to task to task there's a lot of paperwork you don't ever get to know a patient you're just sticking needles and arms and doing things that need to be done but are not intimate whereas when
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you're a hospice nurse you spend an hour with a person you really get to know them you you visit them every week sometimes for months and it's much more anyway so fair enough totally reasonable answer and then we started talking about her life and she said I'm going to get these details wrong but something like my brother died at 20 and my other brother died at 24 and my niece died at 11 and my you know nephew died and again
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I'm I'm maybe getting these details wrong but a lot of there had been so much early death in her family family and as she was telling me one of death after another after another she said oh I wonder if that has something to do with my choice of work I I it felt like such a an amazing privilege to be there at that moment because it literally had not occurred to her before this Central understanding of her life what led you
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to interview Derek parfit oh what led me to well I have to be honest although I had um reasons and persons his first book on my shelf for many years I had not read it and I did not know because I am not deeply uh part of this the philos
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philosophical community that he had a new book coming out so the idea came from my uh editor Henry finder who does know a great deal about philosophy and suggested that it would be a good subject and I was delighted because I'd
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been meaning to read reasons and persons and I mean as you know it's an electrifying book it's so exciting and so I was thrilled to to do it if during a profile when you describe people's looks are you worried that you're reinforcing stereotypes no but I have but isn't there a thing lookism well of course but there's sexism there's racism and lookism people who look a certain way you should make certain inferences is
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there any way we can describe people's looks that doesn't run that danger probably not but I'll say two things about this okay first is I think there's far too much emphasis on describing people's looks because the thing about
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humans is that their faces are unique so you can describe somebody but you're never going to be able to call up an exact picture in a reader's mind about what the person looks like so uh you know what you're doing is not really
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describing what they look like what you're doing is evoking something which I guess is what the the malign form of that is lookism but you know I've started avoiding describing what people look like not because it results in
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lookism though I'm sure that's true but because whether unconsciously or not it puts the reader in a position of being outside the person looking at them um and what sometimes though not always I'm trying to do is give the reader a sense
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of what it's like to be inside that person's head and the more that you describe the physical person the physical circumstances of the person anything that involves being outside the person looking at them the less you cultivate that sense of intimacy that comes from being inside their head and looking out through their eyes in these dialogues we often have a segment overrated or underrated shall I ask you a few questions Kenneth tinan
40:34
overrated or underrated underrated I am so glad you asked no one seems to know who he is well he was such a figure of his time I mean it's it's very interesting Kenneth tin and he was a I should say because no one knows who he is he was a uh I guess theater critic started out as a theater critic in England in the ' 50s and then in the 60s and late ' 60s I think early '70s um came over to America and started writing for the New Yorker and a very
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interesting thing happened to his writing I don't know to what extent it was a result of the New Yorker or whether it was just him getting old but he when he was a young man his writing was electric and Baroque I mean you know the adjective to noun ratio was so high there was like no every sentence was encrusted with adjectives and adverbs and and there was no sentence that was just getting from A to B it was just so
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what many people would say overwritten but I thought was so extra it was it was just exciting your incredible essay so exciting under today yes but and an interesting thing happened and I I wonder which you prefer because as he
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got older his writing got pler and calmer and it stopped jumping about trying to arrest your attention it St I only like the earlier Kenneth din you know I do too but I think there is something about taste today that per ERS
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a clearer sort of more limpid kind of pros and while I understand that sometimes overwriting can be annoying sometimes it's just lazy and you read early kentin and you realize people aren't trying hard enough I mean you can't just say cup you have to come up with I I'm not even going to try to imitate him but suffice to say people should read him more the Quenton Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs overrated or underrated well I love that movie but
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I I don't really know if it's overrated or underrated cuz I don't know how it's rated I mean I think most people love it so I would say it's I think it's been given its due it was slightly overshadowed by pul fiction which was also a terrific movie but but I think most people won't watch it so sort of people like us oh well then under maybe all love it so I would say underly underrated uh the DSM Diagnostic and statistical Manual of mental
42:47
disorders we're going way back in time overrated or under pieces no kidding I can't believe you read that um I would say and I'm very curious what you think I mean I think it is underrated because people you know there's this silly
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notion that what psychiatrists do is label people with diagnoses and that that's you know really stigmatizing and and for sure sometimes that's what Psychiatry does but I think that a lot of the anti psychiatric discourse is
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founded on misunderstanding that the DSM is psychiatry's Bible That's What many people call it whereas in fact it's more like a dictionary what it is is a groupings each each disorder is a grouping of symptoms that enable psychiatrists to come to consistent uh you know talk to each other in consistent ways because they're using the language of psychiatry in consistent ways without which the the you know the discipline could not
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function at all so I don't think it is as uh as evil as people think what do you think I guess I'm more skeptical I think of the categories as being used to define when an insurance payment should be made yeah and it takes a lot of
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people who have very you know mixed traits or not things that I would call a disorder and it labels them in a way that is stigmatizing certainly that can happen absolutely but I think it's important to remember that that a label
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and a diagnosis while it for sure can be stigmatizing and can be dreadfully so I mean you know the early DSM uh notoriously uh labeled homosexuality as a disorder obviously that was both stigmatizing and terribly wrong but at the same time in some cases a diagnosis can be comforting it performs many different functions sometimes a diagnosis means to a person ah I am not the only one there are other people who've encountered this before people
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have thought about what it means thought about ways to alleviate the symptoms that give me pain There's Hope the older British culture of copile Scholars overrated or underrated impossible to uh to overrate impossible to overrate okay uh using tape recorders for interviews h i I always do that because um I mean not always if I'm just interviewing someone for information I try not to because transcribing tapes is is a very timec
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consuming process but one of the things I love about interviewing people is their language the the very the minutia of the way they use words and you can't always get that when you're just in a normal conversation uh because you hear
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to to some extent what you're expecting to hear um and when you're taking notes on what someone says you try to do it verbatim but sometimes you will use phrases that you expected them to hear because it's the normal way to say
45:35
something but if you play a tape back you hear that they didn't say that they didn't say what you thought they said they said something a tiny bit different and it's so exciting because they said it in a way that's a little weird and is just their own and I find that exciting the way some poetry is what's your favorite part of China to visit you know I've not been to China since 1985 so I can't answer that question I'm sure it's
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completely different I'll give you a little anecdote that shows you how long ago that was um I know you've been to China many times my father is a China scholar and my mother was a journalist who wrote about Asia and so both of them had been to China many times and we were at a hotel in Shanghai in 85 and we were standing in the lobby and they they both of them said what is that and my brother and I who were kids said uh it's music
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obviously what's the big deal and they said no no no we have to find where that's coming from and they followed the sound of the music we all four of us went to to follow the sound of the music and it was this little tiny disco in one
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of the rooms in the hotel with a little disco ball uh you know rotating and multicolored lights and they were playing bony M this uh this British uh band from the'80s and to my brother and I this was a normal site my parents
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their jaws were open they they couldn't believe that there was a disco in China that's how long ago it was I went I went there what kind of cyborg would you like to be I would certainly like to have a far better memory than I than I do and I think that could probably be arranged um there's not taking software and now with voice recognition doesn't this do it for you no because that um in order to to to make use of any kind of external memory
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function be it's a library or note taking software or what have you you have to know what you're looking for um what I want is that's that's the problem with with external U memories that it doesn't make the weird connections that
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your own mind does don't you think I mean what what would you like in terms of being a cyborg uh the ability to get to more places more quickly so really fast transportation without limit if you could have anything that would be it I
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think so other than say living longer wait so the biggest problem in your life is is time wasted on planes yes no it's not just the time wasted I mean I read while I'm flying right exactly but it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of money connections are very indirect if I could just walk into a Star Trek transporter and be in usbekistan we wouldn't be doing this podcast right now perhaps that is fascinating I mean you
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know plain delays are annoying but I I have to say I've never considered them the biggest problem in life now your next book is on why people leave American small towns and general issues of geographic Mobility why has American
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cross State Mobility fallen so much since the 1980s well you could probably answer that question better than I I mean I think a lot of the reasons are economic people have started moving you know it used to be that in general
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people move to places with more jobs because they were looking for jobs which sounds perfectly logical and now people are often moving to places with fewer jobs because housing is cheaper um which is a sort of pessimistic and depressing um fact but I I I'm glad you asked about this because I want I I I know we're both interested in this question and um one of the things I want to think about in this book is how people who stay are
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not necessarily staying because they're stuck I think that is there's a there's a dominant American mythology that the the smart ambitious interesting people move they leave not just small but anywhere uh they leave their homes and
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they go somewhere else partly because they're Restless partly because they're curious and partly because what they want to do is so big it can't be done where they are and that leaves the people who stay looking looking dull by
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comparison but I really want to question that I mean the the sort of load star of this project at least so far is um the great Economist Albert Herman's essay uh exit voice and loyalty which I'm sure you know um he argued that if you're discontent ENT with where you are or what product you're buying or discontent with something you can do two things you can exit which means you can either leave or a place or stop buying a
50:06
product or you can exercise voice you can you can complain you can try to change it and I think this is extraordinarily important when thinking about issues of Mobility because if everyone left if everyone's response to
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a bad job or a bad home was to leave then nothing is fixed it's the people who say no actually I don't want to leave this is my home and there are many things wrong with it but because I don't want to leave because I feel attached to
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it for other reasons I'm going to fight so it's really striking to me that the Civil Rights Movement was driven in its earliest days not by the African-Americans who migrated North in search of jobs but by those who were still home in Alabama and many other many other states who didn't want to leave um I talked the other day to um the extraordinary attorney um Fred gray who I couldn't believe he was still alive he was the person who defended
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Rosa Parks and and Martin Luther King Jr in the bus boycott and the reason he's still alive is he did that when he was 25 and he went to law school in Cleveland because there were no law schools in Alabama who would accept
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black students at that point um and his Professor there said don't go back to Alabama you won't be able to practice they won there's no room for a black GLW in Alabama it's too racist to stay here you'll have a proper much better career
51:28
and he said no the whole reason that I'm in law school is to go back to Montgomery and attack segregation and it was his loyalty to Montgomery if he had stayed in Cleveland and had a you know what appeared to be a better career of course it wouldn't have been but sensibly um might have been reasonably expected could have been you know he would never have played a part in this extraordinary movement similarly uh unions you know if anyone who was
51:56
dissatisfied with their uh wage they reacted by going to the next employer there would never be people who would stay and fight for higher wages and group together with people like them in the same position if we think of all of the factors that induce or impel people to stay rather than leave what's the underrated factor or the one people aren't focusing enough upon I've I've I've been talking to a lot of people about this and I think
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an underrated one one of the underrated factors is sheer stubbornness um I read this book by this um this guy David Frost Jr a man who lived his whole almost his whole life in a little town called eufala Alabama in the Southeast um part of the state and all of his siblings um left the town um because there was greater opportunity elsewhere most of them went to Cincinnati um one went to Chicago one went um to somewhere
52:55
else I forget but somewhere else where there were where there were jobs and opportunity and this was not only um a small town but a small southern town in the uh you know he was coming of age in the 20s and 30s it was very difficult
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for a black man to get ahead in this town and at one point he was trying to register people to vote and he was thrown in prison and he heard that judge Wallace who I think was not George Wallace at that point but George
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Wallace's brother Jack Wallace wanted him never to come back to eala because he was a troublemaker wanted him to go and his brothers in Cincinnati were saying come join us we can get you a job tomorrow you can earn so many times more than you can earn in eufala just come join us and have a better life and he when he heard that judge Wallace wanted him out of eala he was like no I'm going back no one's going to push me out and it was just sheer
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ordinariness in I mean not only but that was a big factor and why he was like no no one's going to push me out I'm going to stay here this is my home and Extreme altruists as a group if you have to classify them mentally are they levers or stayers huh that's an interesting question I think and how do your two books tie together yeah well I think they're probably levers because most of the people I talked to want to help humans generally I don't
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know if this there's a necessary connection between strength of sense of Duty and attachment to a Universalist morality but in the people that I spoke to they were not particularly attached to helping their own Community they
54:38
wanted to help people in general and they looked about for the best way to do that and often that meant either going somewhere else themselves or at the very least sending their money far away and this is part of the reason I wanted to
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write this book now because there I found in conversations with people about such altruists that there was such a resistance to that such a resistance to the idea that the best thing you could do for your life do in your life was to donate or give or help people with whom you had no organic connection there was such an attachment to the idea that a person ought to help their own Community First and I wanted to explore that
55:21
because the altruists I was talking to to them this made no sense I mean I remember one man I spoke to Jeff Jeff calman would say why should I have more obligation to a stranger who lives on two blocks away from a stranger who
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lives in Ethiopia made no sense to him he understood that you know if someone's a member of his family or a friend he might have more obligation to them but if if someone was equally a stranger why should Place make a difference I've come
55:48
to think that place makes a great deal of difference it's sometimes suggested that people are always writing about themselves is that is that true for you and if it is how do you understand that it's not true for me I write I tend to want to write about people I admire and don't altogether understand and I write to understand them better as our final segment a few questions about the Lissa mcfar production function as we call it
56:20
so many of your pieces profiles have philosophy in them what's your philosophy opical background formal or otherwise I have none um I you read philosophy you've read parfit yeah you understand philosophy at a deep level where does that come from uh I love it I mean I I I love reading philosophy and I but I I stupidly I didn't take philosophy classes in in college I don't know I I I had I think I had an experience that many people have had
56:48
which is they uh approach they want to study philosophy because they think it's going to be about the meaning of life and they get into a philosophy class and it turns out to resemble more like it's something more like algebra they're just discouraged and uh move on to some other discipline and that's what happened to me but I I I love philosophy now could you ever imagine relaunching lingua franka could such a thing survive today
57:09
you had an early role in it correct uh yeah yeah I mean I I edit I was an editor at Linko Franco which is a now defunct uh magazine about Academia yeah I I absolutely think so I mean I mean one of the interesting things about
57:23
this time of is that there seems to be so much appetite it's almost like the 1890s again there seems to be so much appetite for talks about ideas there are all these lectures that PE that are attended and sold out about relatively
57:40
abstract obscure subjects and the internet also has has disseminated all kinds of writing about abstract ideas that I think people didn't know how many people would be interested in reading such things um so I think yeah absolutely what's your most unusual writing habit oh gosh I don't know what about yours give me an idea day no matter what I think it's unusual I do well you have a Blog I have a Blog still I have two Bloomberg
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columns a week I write other things and is that important why do you think it's important to write every day you it means you're never not writing and something gets done and a lot of it is never used or thrown out or or re-edited but it's a way of avoiding having long blocks of time where you don't get writing done which is the bane of many a writer I guess I mean I don't I don't think it's a bane I I I don't think it's a bad
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thing if I'm not writing every day I certainly do not write every day and I don't think that's a bad thing I think it's sometimes good not to be purposeful in what you're doing if you're writing you are you are distilling vague
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thoughts into something more organized and purposeful and I think there's a lot of Merit to allowing thoughts to just meander about in your head and make weird connections with each other before you push them onto the page final
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question let's say a very smart 22-year-old comes up to you and they say they would like to emulate your career not in every detail and obviously the path you took is no longer exactly available but what advice would you give
59:11
that person overall I would say that the predictions of the death of publishing and the death of reading have been going on for decades and they should ignore them it's not true people will continue to read I don't know what form they'll
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continue to read in they may uh not read on paper they may read only online but if a person wants to be a writer there is no reason not to do that Lissa thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on tunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show