 How the sandworm turns J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, did not like Dune. Those of us who love both books may find that sad — in some respects Dune is to modern science fiction what Tolkien’s work is to modern fantasy, i.e. basically the foundational document — but it is still the case: He wrote to a friend that “I dislike Dune with some intensity,” but “in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent.” He did not elaborate further, and never gave any public comments on Frank Herbert’s work. On Whither the West?, the philosophically inclined author Scott Mauldin thinks he can explain the antipathy: Tolkien’s and Herbert’s imaginary universes embody diametrically opposite views of ethics. The two main camps of moral philosophy are deontology, the idea that acts are good or bad in themselves, and consequentialism, the idea that the moral value of an act depends on its consequences. Tolkien favored the first, says Mauldin: In his works, the road to evil is to “commit small acts of evil that nonetheless work toward a greater good.” In Dune, on the other hand, characters perform “millennia-long evil, countless acts of barbarity and oppression, to achieve a possible good.” A rich jewel Ethiopia is one of Africa’s quiet economic success stories. It has not always been so — readers of a certain vintage may always associate it with the appalling 1983-1985 famine which killed over a million people. As recently as 2002, it was the poorest country in Africa, with inflation-adjusted average annual earnings of $197. In 2022, that figure was $1,028, and triple that if you take into account purchasing power. The nation is on course to be considered “lower middle-income,” rather than “low income,” by next year. Yaw Asamoah, a writer with an interest in economics and Africa, has written a three-part investigation into Ethiopia, with the third covering the country’s post-2000 economic miracle. “Ethiopia’s economy is unique in Africa,” he writes, as it is neither a huge exporter of mined goods or petrochemicals: Its biggest foreign earnings are its national airline, tourism, and coffee. It has introduced market-friendly reforms, loosened permits on land use, and boosted agricultural mechanization. “If Ethiopia can refine its export manufacturing strategy,” writes Asamoha, “Ethiopia can catch up to other developing nations like Bangladesh or Vietnam.” A conspiracy of dunces People often think of conspiracy theorists as ignorant. How can you believe that the world is flat, when you can just look at the evidence? But, says the anonymous writer Bentham’s Bulldog, most conspiracy theorists have looked at the evidence — and often they have an argument for why you shouldn’t believe it. When it comes to the roundness of the Earth, “I, like most people who think the earth is round, probably know less about it than most people who think the earth is flat.” The problem conspiracy theorists have is not a shortage of knowledge. Often they have huge stores of knowledge, because they’re deeply invested in the topic. People who hubristically think they wouldn’t fall for these ideas are often wrong: “The reason most people reject conspiracy theories is that they are conformists — they just believe things that sound normal.” That’s often a good heuristic: “If smart people mostly think your belief is crazy then it probably is.” But that’s useless when you’re arguing against people who do believe those things, because they will know the object-level facts and you will not. |
