An hour later, Sunil was back on his street; he’d forgotten a book. From outside their apartment door, Sunil heard Amy on the phone, “He works so slowly—I’m not even sure what he does all day at the library. How could he not have made any progress in six months—maybe more?”
More. It was more. But she didn’t know that.
He pushed open the warped door. Amy was sprawled on the floor, phone to her ear. He fetched the book and waited until she was done. “Who were you talking to?”
“Monica,” she said. “I realized I couldn’t get married without my sister, so I called to invite her.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m sorry, love. I didn’t mean for you to overhear that. I just feel like I can’t ask you what’s going on because you’re so stressed out. But I should’ve just talked to you.”
“And said what?” He pressed his heels into the cracked floorboards until his toes tingled.
“That you seem to be reading endlessly to keep from writing.”
“You know what I’m doing is really hard, right? Coming up with something new to say after two thousand years of analytic philosophy. It’s not like we have new data to work with, like in medicine. Philosophers have to think up something new using the same evidence we’ve always had.” He winced as he heard himself speak, adding “analytic” like an ass.
Data, in fact, was a point of contention between them. For Amy, “I looked it up,” was a favorite, argument-ending phrase. Like her journalist parents, Amy believed most answers were out there in the world to be discovered. Like he used to think about moral truths.
“I know it’s really hard, but if you just keep at it, the writing, the words will come.” She paused. “I wish you had a course to teach. Teaching was so good for you.”
It had been. Sunil’s scholarship, earmarked for minorities, did not allow him to teach, unlike almost everyone else at Harvard, who’d been TFs, teaching fellows. But last fall he had begged Bernardston, the department chair, to let him do so for just one semester. Bill James, Sunil’s adviser, had strongly discouraged the idea: Sunil needed to devote all his time to his dissertation; teaching was a distraction. But Sunil had persisted. And Lieberman, who could be credited with planting the seed of his dissertation, had supported him; she agreed it would be good for Sunil to explain material to students, and to know if at least the teaching part of the academic enterprise was something that he could be good at.
Bernardston could not bend the rules of his scholarship, but he had offered Sunil a chance to sub for him while he was off at Oxford giving a series of lectures. It would be the most difficult of any teaching situation, at mid-semester, but Sunil had immediately accepted.
The morning he was to lead the class, Sunil threw up his breakfast. His hands shook. Bernardston normally wore jeans and a sport coat to class. Sunil didn’t own a jacket, so he wore his nicest button-down. At some point halfway through, he realized his shirt was misbuttoned, one side dragging lower than the other. Heat flushed through his entire body, but he forced himself to think It could be worse and kept going.
He discovered that it was easy for him to create simple, stark paradoxes for his students. He could make them understand why personal identity was not a simple matter of a singular brain yoked to a singular body. What if brain and body were cloned, was You2 still you? What about memories? If I don’t remember what happened yesterday, is that yesterday-person me? Students had arrived in the classroom with low visors, droopy eyes, yet he had been able to induce many of them to think for fifty minutes. There were awful moments of demoralizing, vacuum-packed silence, but by the end of the class, his prodding had yielded results. Hands in the air!
At the end of the semester, Bernardston had called Sunil in to his office. “I have to say you’ve set up something of a problem for me. Because of the class you taught, now my students are asking for more discussion.”
“So, they got something out of it?”
“I don’t know, but they liked it.” Bernardston smiled.
Now Amy said to Sunil, “When you sit down to write, can you pretend that you’re teaching someone? Could that be a way to reboot?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s a good idea.” He kissed her on the cheek, and headed back to campus.
Later that day, Sunil sat in on an ethics seminar. It was taught by the abrupt but persuasive Rivka Lieberman. Sunil had taken this same seminar two years ago, during Lieberman’s first year with the department, and the questions it raised had burrowed inside him. Sunil had felt mentally sharper during that class than any other time. Philosophy became urgent.
It had started with J. L. Mackie, an Australian ethicist writing in the 1970s. Mackie asked why there was such variation in moral beliefs among different cultures. Why, for example, did some cultures believe in monogamy and others polygamy? It couldn’t be, Mackie argued, that one culture simply had a better ability to grasp moral truths than another. It didn’t make sense that one culture would be somehow more attuned to what was good and what was bad. This had led Mackie to argue for an antirealist view: the view that moral truths did not exist independently of our beliefs about them. That is, certain actions, practices, and desires were valuable only because humans thought them so: monogamy was good because humans valued the practice, not because it was objectively the right way to live. Sunil had thought Mackie’s reasoning valid, but he was bothered by the premise. Sunil didn’t see such wide variation in moral beliefs. He instead saw strong uniformity and thought that the differences philosophers pointed to were superficial. Didn’t the uniformity mean we were all attuned to the same moral reality? The human burden was to acknowledge and follow moral scripts.
But then, one day in her office, Lieberman had challenged Sunil. She asked, “If, as you say, there are widely shared moral beliefs, what’s the origin story that explains them?”
It was a good question. For several moments he sat in silence. The tick-tock feeling of his college pre-med classes crept up on him. That unbearable scrambling for the answer. And then, for the first time, one of these courses came to his aid—his class on evolutionary biology, and Robert Trivers’s paper “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Trivers argued that reciprocal altruism—“I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”—was not simply a human social nicety but necessary to facilitating the survival of the species. Sunil realized that if evolution could account for this kind of behavior, then evolution could also be responsible for the universality of moral principles. He explained this thought to Lieberman, concluding, “Just as the human species has developed ears because hearing is evolutionarily advantageous, in that it promotes survival, humans have developed certain moral judgments that advance the gene pool.”
“Good. Now forget about Mackie, and start at the beginning,” Lieberman said. “Tell me the problem without jargon.”
Sunil took a deep breath. “Okay. So, Mackie aside, let’s take the standard example of torturing little babies for fun. Most of us don’t think it’s wrong because our society thinks that it is wrong; rather, we believe that torturing babies for fun is wrong because it really is wrong, that it would be wrong even if we never thought about it. So we act as though we have moral antennae that can detect what’s right and what’s wrong. In abstract terms, we believe that our moral judgments are about a moral reality that is independent of us, not a reality that is created by us.”
She nodded. Sunil continued. “However, we also believe in evolution, which means we believe evolutionary forces have had a big role in shaping our moral judgments. If evolution had gone differently, and the world itself were different, if we were, say, shumans instead of humans, our moral beliefs would be different. If torture actually made babies stronger, maybe shumans would think it’s okay to torture them for fun.”
Lieberman waited for Sunil to bring the two points together.
“But once
we realize that our moral beliefs are shaped by evolution, we can’t trust that they’re correct. Because evolution only cares about what’s reproductively advantageous. Evolution doesn’t care about the rightness or wrongness of torturing little babies; if torture gave us a survival advantage, as absurd as that sounds, evolution would be okay with that.”
“Can you give me an analogy?” Lieberman leaned back in her chair, balancing precariously on its hind legs.
Sunil looked out the window, listened to the traffic noise. He briefly recalled a scene he’d witnessed on his walk to campus—an older woman, exasperated, leaning over the open, steaming hood of her car. “I’ve got it. It’s like Evolution is a used-car salesman. He says to you, ‘Hey, come drive this efficient, eco-friendly car’—what we’d consider a good car—when really he doesn’t care if the car is good, or if it’s a total lemon. He’s just out to make a buck. He’s not necessarily sleazy, he just doesn’t care one way or another. The end result is all that matters. When you realize this, you distrust everything the salesman has told you. You can’t trust him to have provided you with a good car. So in the case of evolution, evolution is concerned with perpetuating life itself, and this may or may not provide an accurate guide to moral truths.”
Sunil paused. Too casual? Had he lost her with the used-car salesman?
Landing her chair on all four legs, Lieberman said, “So your point is that your moral beliefs start to unravel when you realize their source is not guided by the truth.” She paused and looked at him directly. “At the metaphorical level, what you say makes sense. So now you need to put it in concrete terms.”
These terms were what Sunil had been working on the past two years. At first, as he continued to push back against Mackie’s premise, he believed he was defending moral realism. It was therefore a great and terrible irony that Sunil discovered that his view about evolutionary pressures on moral beliefs led him to the conclusion that moral truths do not exist. Or at least that we have no idea if they do or not. This skeptical implication had destabilized Sunil’s project, so much so that his writing had stalled.
He was now revisiting Lieberman’s course in the hope that Mackie, or someone, would get him going again. Lieberman was not on his dissertation committee, of which Bill James was chair, but, having helped him shape his project, one she had suggested was uniquely promising, she claimed to be invested in the outcome. She periodically checked in with him. But the spring semester was now three-quarters over, and Sunil had nothing but his verbal contributions to her class to show for it. After a promising prospectus, his dissertation had flatlined.
After class, Sunil found Lieberman waiting for him outside the seminar room. Animated, pushing her hair back to show dark brows and a fine, straight nose, she said, “Sunil. Stop and talk to me. What is the problem.”
She was so unnerving. It was disorienting the way she asked questions without the question mark. The way she asked also made Sunil suspect the faculty were talking about him, which rattled him further.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You stopped talking in class. You think I wouldn’t notice? First eight, nine weeks you’re jumping in and objecting, you have the books in your hand, I see the marks. But then, the last two weeks, since the readings on antirealism, you don’t say anything and I think that I have made it unbelievably boring.”
“I’ve taken this class before,” he reminded her. He wanted to tell her that he always learned from her, but something made him hold back. He squirmed under her gaze. She was large-boned and large-breasted, with wide hips and a flushed neck that embarrassed him.
Then he surprised himself by saying something revealing, setting free the worry on the tip of his tongue. “It’s just that this view is messing with my head. It’s making me doubt some pretty fundamental things—like whether we’re justified in holding people accountable for their actions.”
Lieberman nodded. “You’re terrified. The skeptical worry is taking over your life.”
“Yes.” He realized how much he wanted to impress her, to prove correct her faith in him.
“This is normal,” she said, then tilted her head to look at him quizzically. “Do you believe our philosophical views should guide our lives?”
“Yes, sometimes.” His stomach began to turn.
“Then you should prepare for a revolution, my friend. Perhaps for anarchy.” She was teasing, in her unfunny, Israeli way. She smiled like a wolf.
Sunil was convinced that evolution provided a cohesive universal story about how humans came to share a set of moral principles, but the conclusions were dark and left him feeling alienated, unmoored, and nauseous. He was not ready for revolt.
He should take this opportunity to talk with Lieberman. Because the anxieties about his project seemed only to be relieved by airing them in conversation. Not by working alone and writing. Writing was supposed to be cathartic, as he believed it was for his closest friends, his professors, and probably for everyone else writing philosophy everywhere. His friend Erik was even writing in his second language, Norwegian being his first. But writing was not cathartic or clarifying for Sunil. It was hard and horrifying. Words on paper were non-negotiable; they had to be absolutely sure of themselves. Which his were not.
But now, instead of inviting him into her office, she said, “When you are ready, let me know.”
He nodded.
Then she added quickly, “Your passion is inspiring,” and turned and walked away.
Earlier in the semester, she had stopped him in the hall to tell him she’d been thinking about something he had said, and the intoxicating pride and excitement had carried him for hours. Now her abrupt goodbye left him standing alone, useless.
He had to get out of here. Sunil hurried down the hall toward the common room, where Andrew was waiting. Halfway there, Sunil passed James. Sunil waved and smiled; he was meeting with his adviser tomorrow. But James walked right past him. Of course he did.
Sunil panicked. The combined punches of Lieberman turning her back and James’s snub skyrocketed his insecurity. He had to fetch Andrew, but Sunil couldn’t bear the nervous energy of the other grad students. The hall smelled of photocopy paper, microwaved soup, and steamy anxiety. Sunil barged into the buzzing common room and signaled urgently for Andrew to leave as quickly as possible.
“James is kind of blind, right? Those thick glasses,” he said as they walked out and away from Emerson Hall.
Andrew shouldered a smooth leather bag and wound a scarf around his milk-white neck. “Sure, the guy is old. He sits in the front row at talks and still cups his hands behind his ears. Why?”
“He just walked right by me.”
“Well, he must hate you.”
The cold air struck Sunil in the face. He bent his head and the wind knifed his scalp. Amy was always reminding him to bring a hat, and Sunil was always forgetting. Andrew and Sunil were in the same cohort, but Andrew had an adviser who thought he was smart. He was nearly done with his dissertation and didn’t seem to have struggled writing it. He was not who Sunil wanted for company right now.
Daily, Sunil saw examples of what he’d turn into if he didn’t finish his dissertation. They were the slight, ghostly figures of the Double-Ds. Harvard was notorious for letting people continue for ten or eleven years. One guy had entered the program in 1985, fifteen years ago. Another had bragged to him that he was able to live on two dollars a day, which Sunil disbelieved until he saw the man picking through trash cans. Sunil and his friends mocked the Double-D grad students behind their backs. Yet at the same time, Sunil and Andrew and Erik were afraid of them. The older guys—and they were all guys—knew a lot, they’d read a lot, they’d been to countless talks and dissertation defenses. They knew how to argue. Sunil envied their alacrity and sharpness.
Years ago, toward the end of his sophomore year of college, Sunil had called his father from a pay
phone. I quit! he’d yelled over the beer pong being played down the hall. He’d enrolled in the pre-med track (where he’d studied evolutionary biology) to please his dad, but he had hated the classes, found them stultifying and difficult. To be a doctor, he’d discovered, you had to have many webs of detailed knowledge at your fingertips. You had to render a response in seconds. Sunil had not been able to summon whole biological processes at once, was minutes behind his classmates in arriving at an answer. Everything was so damn fast, and it made him feel trapped and stupid. He had grown to hate the word answer, the word evidence. He instead felt compelled by philosophical inquiry, one in which our most fundamental impulses and assumptions were questioned and explored. In which progress meant intellectual discovery, rather than a body of knowledge learned, or even a life saved.
Rosie’s was strewn with peanut shells and smelled sour, but there were free pretzels and three-dollar pitchers before four. Their beer arrived with mozzarella sticks, courtesy of their waitress, a mousy undergrad. Sunil wasn’t hungry, but he ate. It was his mother’s ingrained injunction: food wasn’t worth eating when it cooled past piping. He swallowed roughly as the cheese sticks scratched his throat.
“Forget it,” Andrew said, picking up their earlier conversation. “James doesn’t snub. He might not like people all that much—and by ‘people’ I mean everyone—but he wouldn’t do something to make you—and by ‘you’ I mean anyone—feel bad.”
Andrew’s face could change from sincere to mocking in a flash. Now he was sincere—eyebrows hiked up, mouth in a wide, soft line. The luxurious confidence that came from growing up rich. Yet Andrew deserved every academic award he received. It was right that his friend would progress and Sunil would stagnate. Sunil sweated into his shirt, the nice white one he’d worn out of respect for his seminar, for Lieberman. She had once commented approvingly on his dressing up for class. She’d then complained that as a woman who had to garner respect, she felt compelled—at least until she got tenure—to wear suit jackets, which she hated. Sunil had never before thought about how women needed to dress better than the men, several of whom taught in T-shirts.
The Limits of the World Page 3