Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Books, Philosophy

Book Review: The Score

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you feel like your life is just a game, this book explains why. As philosopher C Thi Nguyen explains, have we let metrics twist our values? The author argues that when we use simple, clear metrics to measure success, we often “capture” our complex values and shrink them down to fit those metrics

In the Domesday Book of 1086, a manuscript record of the Great Survey conducted at the behest of William the Conqueror, philosopher C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. No doubt that was a useful measure, but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others, so how much land, exactly, would the average family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.

If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority and powers begin to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge is forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.

– Nguyen examines how institutions and bureaucracies use game-like scoring to control behaviour, often at the cost of our autonomy and personal joy

The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry. At its heart, Nguyen’s argument is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets and built rules around them. The result is that our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. As well as being a philosopher, Nguyen is a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing, and even yo-yoing; or, in other words, he understands the utility of rules. Yet, he writes, that, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.

Early on, for instance, he mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. At least the pastor works in a setting where the problem can be aired. For most of us, fixated on annual targets in various settings, the number of likes on social media, and the steps recorded on our fitness apps, external metrics work beneath our notice, replacing our original values. ‘I have 1,000 friends and took 10,000 steps today’: supposedly makes the claimant healthy and popular.

Academia, to no one’s great surprise, is far from immune either. Nguyen argues that the US News & World Report university rankings “no longer celebrate academic distinctiveness”, because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the US News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school – the one at the top of the list.

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US department of state metric called Tip (Trafficking in Persons), which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. It is well established that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and, as a result, reduces sex trafficking, the Tip report’s metrics indicate failure – because conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”

The author’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge – for a few minutes or a few hours – from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of an ending.

So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books? Take up the violin? Stick it to The Man wherever we can? Such things don’t sound like a call to revolution, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their agency – and this book will help them do so – but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments, and bureaucracies of all kinds would abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.

In the early part of the narrative, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put.

In an otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, critics may well point to the fact that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to many readers, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. For those up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.

But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight – and not just merely tick off some talking points – then The Score should be read. You’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with adeptness.

– The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game is published by Allen Lane, 368pp    

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Britain, Europe, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Europe must awaken or face great insecurity in 2026

EUROPE

THE great Victorian jurist, Sir Henry Maine, wrote: “War appears to be as old as mankind… but peace is a modern invention”. Events in the early part of 2026 will doubtless prove his wisdom by showing the awful fragility of that particular invention.

Even if they had never heard of Maine, the most complacent Europeans should have learnt from Vladimir Putin’s relentless onslaught against Ukraine that peace is neither a natural state nor the default setting of advanced countries, but rather a historical aberration that can only be preserved through strength and vigilance.

Yet, in 2025, we discovered how Europe remains divided between nations that grasp this lesson – or never forgot it – and those that cling with obstinance to old delusions. Leading the former category are Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Having broken free of the Kremlin within living memory, these countries know exactly what it means to be invaded by Russia: they will do anything to prevent this from happening again.

And what of Britain? Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s grandiose rhetoric (“a battle-ready armour-clad nation”), Britain remains firmly imprisoned in the camp of the deluded. The PM revealed his priorities in the Budget when he preferred social policies over defence, such as appeasing Labour backbenchers by abolishing the two-child benefit cap. This Government will allocate another £17bn to welfare by 2030, the exact sum that would have allowed Britain to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. This looks as if Sir Keir has decided to place his own political survival – and the prejudices of his party – before the national security of his country, and for that there is bound to be a reckoning.

The outcome of those decisions is that Britain will enter 2026 at greater risk than was necessary. The perils ahead could scarcely be greater. The first and most immediate danger is that Donald Trump could collaborate with Putin to impose Russia’s peace terms on Ukraine. The guns along the frozen 800-mile front might then fall silent, but any respite would almost certainly be temporary while Russia rearms and regroups. If Putin achieves what he believes to be victory in Ukraine, he would be emboldened to come back for more. We should remember that today’s tragedy in Ukraine is Putin’s third war of attrition and conquest since the assault on Georgia in 2008. Like all aggressors, his appetite remains insatiable.

If there is a flawed peace in 2026, Putin’s next move could be a renewed attack on Ukraine, to achieve his original goal of subjugating the entire country. He might consider still more dangerous options. If he concludes that Mr Trump no longer cares about defending America’s allies, Putin could risk attacking a NATO member and the signs are ominous. If so, Britain would be obliged to stand with our allies and go to war with Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power. Do we in Britain have any idea of what this would entail, or where such a crisis might lead?

There are still ways of ensuring that we never have to find out. We can rally our European allies to deliver more support to Ukraine, protecting Volodymyr Zelensky from being muscled into a false peace that rewards aggression. And we must do whatever is necessary to secure America’s commitment to NATO. Both imperatives require Britain and the rest of Europe to emulate Poland and its neighbours and spend far more on defence.

The second danger and the threat is rising is that China’s colossal military build-up might culminate in a confrontation with the United States and its allies in the Pacific. In 2025 alone, China commissioned 14 frigates and destroyers into its fleet; the Royal Navy, by contrast, has only 13 of these warships. 2026 has begun with China conducting intensive exercises in the waters around Taiwan, apparently simulating a blockade of that democratic island.

A full-scale invasion of Taiwan remains unlikely, this year, though Xi Jinping is believed to have ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready in 2027. But no possibility can be excluded and China’s lightning military expansion will heighten the danger. That threat is likely to reach its peak later in this decade.

Elsewhere, Mr Trump is going to have to decide whether to go to war in Venezuela to overthrow Nicolas Maduro’s autocracy. The biggest deployment of US forces in the Caribbean for nearly 40 years cannot be sustained indefinitely. If the president orders US forces into action, the first new conflict of 2026 would be a regime change operation in Caracas, probably combining air strikes with covert action on the ground.

Another authoritarian anti-Western leader who may be fearing for his regime’s future is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. The new year is opening with mass protests in Tehran and other cities.

The Ayatollah’s authority was severely weakened by the successful Israeli-US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants last June. As Khamenei approaches a point of maximum weakness, there must be a chance that 2026 could see the downfall of Iran’s regime, though no-one knows who will take over.

Above all, this has to be the year when Europe finally awakens to the threats and relearns the art of defending itself against aggression. If not, it may be too late to save the modern invention of peace.

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Arts, Books, Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: This is a biography by Anthony Gottlieb. It offers a fresh perspective on one of the 20th century’s most complex thinkers by framing his philosophical evolution against the backdrop of the industrial and technological revolution  

IN October 1911, a 22-year-old postgraduate student in aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester travelled by train to Cambridge. Intrigued by mathematical logic, he wanted to brainstorm and converse with Bertrand Russell, a newly arrived lecturer at Trinity College. A few months later, Russell amazed the young man’s eldest sister by telling her: “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.”

And so, it proved to be. Ten years later, Ludwig Wittgenstein published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book that he strongly believed had solved all the fundamental problems of philosophy. It hadn’t, of course: philosophical problems are by definition intractably insoluble. Yet even though Wittgenstein would come to recant much of the Tractatus, it remains one of the 20th century’s great books.

The Tractatus is essentially a treatise on the limits of language, which, Wittgenstein argues, is useful only for the stating of facts. It follows that a great deal of what we say is literally meaningless. When we talk – as we so often do, about issues of morality, matters of religion, or questions of aesthetics, we use language within these areas that it’s simply not equipped to deal with. We are, according to Wittgenstein, talking nonsense. And that “we” includes philosophers – for they deal not in empirical statements (as scientists do), nor in tautologies (as mathematicians do), but merely in pseudo-problems engendered by the ineluctable and slippery confusions of language.

It should be said that Wittgenstein was none too happy with this – unlike the logical positivists, a grouping of naïve science-focused luvvies, who believed and accepted that the Tractatus was the final word on everything. Wittgenstein didn’t think that the only things that matter are what we can talk about, rather than what we can’t. For all its minatory sound, the Tractatus’s closing line – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – isn’t a cry of triumph but a howl of anguish. Philosophy ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Fittingly enough, the Tractatus was translated into English in 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, and Ezra Pound’s declaration that this was “Year One of a new era”. For Wittgenstein’s book was no less modernist than Eliot’s or Joyce’s, not only in thought but in form too. A series of brief, numbered, and crystalline statements, it has an incantatory attraction that makes it one of those rare works of philosophy that you can read for pleasure.

And then Wittgenstein ripped it all up, proposing instead a radically new set of arguments fundamentally opposed to everything set forth in the Tractatus. Alas, he died in 1951, a couple of years before the publication of his second masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. In it, he grounded our problems with language not in logic, but in our own strictures on how language is used in practice.

Wittgenstein did more than just think. As Anthony Gottlieb shows in his elegantly brief biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, quite a lot went on between the publication of those two great books.   

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 to one of Europe’s wealthiest families (six days after Adolf Hitler; for a while, the two boys attended the same school). He was a peripatetic soul. Just as he gave up aeronautics to become a logician, so he gave up logic to train as an elementary-school teacher, gave up teaching to become a gardener at a monastery, and later gave that up to spend two years as a soi-disant architect designing a spookily perfect house, as austere in its design as the Tractatus, for his youngest sister, Gretl.

His love life was even less settled. One of history’s most tormented homosexuals, Wittgenstein was a tormentor in his turn. He was in the habit of proposing to women while being adamant that their marriage would be chaste. Nor were things easier for the invariably young men he loved, not least because he never told them he loved them. Wittgenstein said that David Pinsent, the dedicatee of the Tractatus, “took half my life away” when he died in a flying experiment a few months before the end of the Great War. Yet “there is no sign”, says Gottlieb, “that Pinsent was aware of such feelings… or that he felt them himself”.

And while the “boyish, kind, sensitive” Francis Skinner was assured of Wittgenstein’s love, Wittgenstein’s diaries reveal that he himself was none too certain: “Lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that it was nothing bad, then with shame.”

For all the flowing felicities of Gottlieb’s style, none of this is easy to read. Which is only right. Wittgenstein occupies such a prominent spot on the philosophical pantheon that it is good to be reminded that he wasn’t just the saintly sage as embodied in Ray Monk’s magnificent The Duty of Genius. He was human, all too human. Unimpeachably brilliant, he was also insufferably arrogant. As his no-less-brilliant friend Frank Ramsey groaned: “If you doubt the truth of what he says, he always thinks you can’t have understood it.” And for a man who argued that ethics can’t be meaningfully discussed, he spent a huge amount of time haranguing people moralistically. Norman Malcolm complained of “his tendency to be censorious”. Georg von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, said that talking with him “was terrible… like living through the day of judgment”.

To be sure, the person Wittgenstein was always hardest on was himself. Thoughts of suicide were rarely from his mind. More than one of his friends was made to listen while he read out a list of his lies and sins. And years after beating his pupils at a primary school in Austria, he returned to apologise to them individually. Before departing this world, he exclaimed: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Maybe so, but one is bound to close this wonderful biography thinking that the linguistic philosopher JL Austin summed him up best: “Poor old Witters.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb is published by Yale University Press, 232pp

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