Best Of: Status Games, Polyamory and the Merits of Meritocracy
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ก.พ. 2024
- For years, Agnes Callard has been on a mission to take ethical philosophy out of the ivory tower. She examines everyday human experiences - jockeying for status, navigating jealousy, marriage - with dazzling detail, publishing regularly in mainstream publications. And she tries to live by her philosophy, too, even if it violates social conventions, as many discovered when The New Yorker published a provocative profile of Callard (www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...) last year.
We recorded this conversation in May 2021, before the New Yorker article drew attention to the details of her home life. (She lives with both her husband and her ex-husband.) But after our episode with Rhaina Cohen about imagining relationships more expansively, we thought it would be interesting to revisit Callard, who has spent so much time dissecting the dynamics and ethics of different relationships and their possibilities.
Mentioned:
“Who Wants to Play the Status Game (thepointmag.com/examined-life...) ?” by Agnes Callard, The Point
“Against Advice (thepointmag.com/examined-life...) ,” by Agnes Callard, The Point
“The Other Woman (thepointmag.com/examined-life...) ,” by Agnes Callard, The Point
“Parenting and Panic (thepointmag.com/examined-life...) ,” by Agnes Callard, The Point
"Aspiration" (www.amazon.com/Aspiration-Age...) by Agnes Callard
Book Recommendations:
"Tolstoy: A Russian Life" (profilebooks.com/work/tolstoy/) by Rosamund Bartlett
"Pessoa: A Biography" (wwnorton.com/books/9780871404718) by Richard Zenith
"Augustine of Hippo" (www.ucpress.edu/book/97805202...) by Peter Brown
“Real Death ( • Real Death ) ” by Mount Eerie
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast (www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-k...) . Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-... (www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-...) .
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.
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I think a big part of compassion is simply enjoying people and their multiplicitous variations. You can change the world only a little bit. You can give a homeless person a couple of dollars, but you aren't usually in a position to drastically change their situation. What you can do is not turn away from them is disgust but view them with dignity. You can delight in people's stories and lives without trying to evaluate where the sit on the pecking order or how they will benefit you.
I do not give homeless people money. Food yes
I think that Agnes Callard is an unusually wise person of deep understanding who is surprising for her use of plain language. The show is consistently thoughtful.
She's on the site Radiopaper. Try writing to her sometime. She usually answers. She's really one of a kind.
She does this topic well. But it is a well worn and oft discussed topic for 2-3 thousand years.
I remember when I was a kid I really hated school and always love to learning on my own and it was a constant struggle with my parents who wanted me to get good grades and go to college but I would say I always knew that won't really mattered wasn't credentials or anything it was how hard you worked and how much value you created for other people and if you had a good attitude it could do very well in life and that turned out to be very true. At times I've made quite a bit more money than my siblings who have Masters degrees and went into the normal career path and followed all the rules and got great grades in school.
An excellent discussion about the ancient topic of theodicy. Cheers.
I am not completely on board with the views that are expressed here, but they have provided some potent fuel for reassessing my current opinions on questions of our relationship to the (hypothetical) meritocracy, status, and relationship to society at large.
In all, a very worthwhile and engaging episode.
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Nobody fails out of meritocracy. Either you're born into the "merit"-owning class, or you're not. If a trait isn't perfectly heritable, by people who are willing to accept it, then it just doesn't get used as a component of "merit".
Nope. Bad things happen to good people all the time. It's a multi-milleinial discussion about unjustified suffering. It's a discussion that can't be boxed into an economics discussion. Theodicy is primary here, as well as the randomness of the probability you even exist.
@@gooddaysahead1 One way that bad things happen to good people is when they're not born into the "merit"-owning class of a meritocracy. Meritocracy has nothing to do with theodicy, or at least no more than all the other versions of "them as has, gets" and "he who has the gold makes the rules" that humanity has afflicted ourselves with.
@@danwylie-sears1134 You appear not to take seriously they understanding of randomness in life. I suspect you believe that life is ordered and predictable, which is absurd.
@@gooddaysahead1 You appear to be unaware of the concept of hyperbole.
The "merit" in meritocracy is largely transmitted from generation to generation by the advantages of wealth (but obviously only largely, not absolutely so -- obviously enough that the idea of absolutely perfect transmission is not in the realm of literal possibility, and thus is available for use as a rhetorical device).
Bizarre that instead of redeeming and refining some aspect of your son's instinct about communal ownership of the shovel, you tried to teach him that it was actually just his.
Hundreds of people see me as a professional who is valuble to them in terms of health and pain
As a model Id rather be doing collaborating with fashion lingerie swimsuit photographers.
This is almost too much.😂 I was caught up. In someone’s story and my own desire for them to be something else and to value something they weren’t ready to become…I gave away a Huge portion of my savings..over the period of 2 years. ( unfortunately it wasn’t the end of the process) This wrecked many friendship’s and my marriage. So because of the length of time… many of these processes discussed here, were thought. about and avoided or rejected, or modified within the context of my religious beliefs. 😮
Do you know Pedro de la Barca's "Life is a Dream?" It speaks to this. You'll love the play. It will become apparent why I mention it. Cheers.
It has benefited me greatly to struggle with just the opening scene of Life is but a Dream by Calderon de La Barca. I haven’t worked so hard over a text in a long time. As I say, I’ve only read the first scene. It is fortunate that this play is in the public domain, as in could leap from your suggestion in a moment of escape from my study of Japanese vocabulary. I have to stop now and switch to yet another task . I’ll get back to this in a couple of days. It took some biographical reading to be motivated to make the decision to dig into the play. However the description is very powerful once one’s patient enough to become absorbed by the scene, and the themes the author has previously established. For a newcomer who isn’t familiar with anything by Calderon. It was very helpful for MS BING to provide it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have persevered.
@@Edo9River, your studies sound cool. That's good to hear you like the play! I can't wait to find out what you think at the end.
I managed the second scene of Act 1. the more I read the more I admire this guy…but I don’t know anyone close to me among family or friends who would share my thoughts about the rich texture of every line as a metaphor, either building on the previous one or starting a closely related new one. And such an interesting twist which the second scene reveals! Also to marvel again at “ the big issues” which he was referring to in the conversation. This is the kind of standard one should have when yearning for dialogue development which is so lacking in the eternal rise of the action thriller……However, having said this, there’s no way to hell that I could actually appreciate it in a spoken form. I would be dead in the water if introduced stone cold after the first few lines…..well this is like the first time I was exposed to Shakespeare, probably.
@@Edo9River, there's a saner version online somewhere (staged by a college company at UMBC IIRC). What I love about the play is the mercy of the king. One writes somebody off after their first missteps and thinks they've found the "truth" of another person's character. But what if they tried one more time? What would they learn from forgiveness? ;) Given your initial post, the play seemed like the ticket. Glad it's growing on you!
Luck reigns supreme!
If you love someone set them free.
Get your damn self out of the way.
😅g9
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2:22 ghost in j VT wasthe 😢a 5 VT😮your a
I'm sorry, Ezra, but to me this is hyper elitist, purely academic claptrap. Might have missed it, but I don't remember the word "compromise" being mentioned in the entire interview, which anyone with an ounce of common sense knows is the key to a happy and successful life.
My 2 cents. Really enjoy the show, this episode not so much.
Thanks.
It's baked in, right? It's hard to consider Aristotle without recognizing the utmost devotion to prudence and compromise around the mean. Orthos logos, which is inherently conversational, is the way you come by the virtuous action.
@@christophergiofreda564 I thought the parenting stuff was kind of interesting, but the stuff on meritocracy and the other more overtly political stuff was not that usefull.
Ya I figured that she of all people would understand compromise.
Free 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸