Fixing Ships and Beheading Loki; The Tragedy of West Side Story; A Prayer for Owen Meany
Fixing Ships and Beheading Loki; The Tragedy of West Side Story; A Prayer for Owen Meany
12/31/2021
Author’s note: My goal when I set out to write this was to get 10 posts out in 2021, and with this edition, we’ll hit that goal! Not sure what 2022 will have in store for Matt’s Newsletter, but thank you for reading these last few months!
Fixing Ships and Beheading Loki
The philosophical tradition offers a couple of fun paradoxes around the problem of identity. Consider the first, “the Ship of Theseus” (summary from Plutarch):
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. (emphasis added)
At the point where every piece of the ship was replaced, was it a new ship? I think intuitively we’d say that it’s a different ship once every single piece of it has changed, but that doesn’t quite yield a handy theory of identity. Even if we all agree it’s a new ship at the end, where do we draw the line? How much change was required for the ship to no longer be considered Theseus’s? When even just one loose plank was removed? Two planks? That doesn’t seem right. Try the other direction. Suppose every plank but one had been changed, is it still the same ship as before? Almost certainly not.
To firmly state any threshold for the identity of the ship would be kind of absurd. A less absurd response to the question would be to ask who cares! The question might seem profound at first glance but without any stakes to the answer, you might reasonably dismiss the question as mere semantics. “Call the ship what you want; I’m going to go back to worrying about the meaning of life” a budding philosopher might respond.
Try a similar version of the problem. Apparently in Norse mythology, the trickster god Loki once made a bet and wagered his head as his adversary’s reward. When Loki lost the bet, his adversary sharpened his axe and came to collect his winnings. But, as he went to swing his axe, Loki protested that of course he could only take the head – any part of Loki’s neck was beyond the scope of the wager. Soon Loki, the adversary, and others began debating where exactly the head ended and the neck began. As it became clear that no such precise line existed, Loki went on his way, content at having held up his reputation as the trickster god. While our budding philosopher might be inclined to dismiss the problem of the Ship of Theseus as trivial, no one could argue the problem of Loki’s wager was trivial; after all, a man’s head hung on the line!
There are further permutations of these problems that I imagine lawyers might have to deal with. If I were ever defending someone for copyright infringement – let’s say over a digital logo – I would want to know what brightline the prosecution would propose for something to constitute a violation of copyright. I suppose a natural brightline might be whether an average person would recognize my image as representing the brand of my accuser’s. But, at the end of the day, that could only be a heuristic. Our perceptions are based in reality and at some quantity of different pixels we would say “the average person would now deem this different”. Suppose we have some image that is deemed a copyright infringement, how many pixels of the image must change before it is no longer illicit? If we were to set every pixel in the image to #FFFFFF, obviously it would not be a violation, so there must be some point at which a sufficient number of the pixels are #FFFFFF. Is it 20%? 30%? 98%? Like Loki’s wager, the stakes here matter! There could be billions of dollars on the line! But of course, any given brightline (“once 73.8% of the pixels are different, then it is unrecognizable and fair use”) will appear absurd. I’m sure IP lawyers have an answer here (there’s generally less bullet biting in law than philosophy), but this stuff is kinda goofy and also hard to dismiss in situations where which goofy answer you pick matters.
Returning to Loki for a moment, I’d posit that the ending of the story doesn’t make any sense. Loki’s adversary should have admitted defeat on the line between neck and head, shrugged, and aimed his axe for Loki’s nose.
The Tragedy of West Side Story
Part of what makes tragedies tragic is that the result isn’t the fault of any individual. It was either a matter of fate or prophecy or clashing personalities without either being uniquely in the wrong. I recently saw West Side Story, and I think part of what makes the story so interesting is that though it’s full of bad people, none of them is really properly the villain. Without trying to excuse the actions of the Jets and the Sharks, the movie/play makes it clear that none of this would be happening but for the conditions our characters find themselves in – surrounded by poverty, lacking role models, subject to ethnic prejudice, etc. Yes, technically speaking, at any moment the leaders of these groups could agree to forgive and forget and recognize that the other isn’t so different from them and sing kumbaya and so on, but that’s not what living in a low-trust society is like. When everyone feels resources are scarce and that if they don’t look out for themselves and continually signal a willingness to engage in violence they’ll die, you’re just not going to get people to cooperate.
If no individual character is the villain of West Side Story, who is? My answer would be Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!1.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Review from Goodreads:
Engrossing story, in no small part because of the fascinating titular character. Moving at times, and a vivid portrait of mid-century New England life. I think it's doing a bit of an Athens and Jerusalem thing with the contrast between the narrator and Owen Meany and seemingly coming down on the side of the latter. What does life look like when we open ourselves to the possibility of events and purposes beyond our current understanding? Irving suggests there's a power and confidence to be found in submission and a curiosity and openness in faith. A nice disposition if you can swing it.
Happy New Year everyone – wishing you all the best in 2022!
The linked piece by Scott Alexander is S-tier internet writing and well worth reading if you haven’t read it before