2024 Year in Review
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Editor in Chief: Let’s start with some fan mail. Readers have asked about the recent cluster of essays touching, in one way or another, on religion. Can you talk about where they came from?
Head Writer: Ha, well, like most things we do, the original motives are lost in the haze of time. I do remember one key moment, a pizza night when the writers watched Wildcat, a strange and wonderful biopic about Flannery O’Connor. There’s a part where she’s in Iowa, studying with Robert Lowell, who hosts a party, and he and Elizabeth Hardwick (his wife at the time) are so smart and sophisticated, and O’Connor is quiet and awkward, but when the topic turns to religion she comes across—surely the filmmaker’s intent—as deep and serious, while Lowell and Hardwick look dilettantish and superficial. That made us think that taking a new look at her stories might be a good idea, and her work cannot be understood apart from her Catholicism.
Ed: So that’s where Flannery O’Connor for Atheists came from. But there was also an earlier essay on Gothic Architecture, and more recently on Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, and Bob Dylan’s Gospel Music.
Head: Yes, so another motive came from actual Academic Philosophy, in which some of us at Mostly Aesthetics occasionally dip a toe. One thing the Philosophy Professors discuss is the limits of fictional worlds. So, okay, when fiction differs from reality, we generally don’t bat an eye, right? Ray guns, space ships, teleportation, time travel, magic, it doesn’t bother us all. This hardly needs mentioning. But some philosophers claim that morality is an exception. We’re fine with story worlds that break the laws of physics, the idea goes, but we don’t allow story worlds to break the “laws of morality.” If doing something, kicking a dog for no good reason, is wrong in reality, then it must also be wrong in a story, unless the author undertakes some very special preparation. This phenomenon has the both opaque and misleading name “imaginative resistance.”
Ed: What does that have to do with religion?
Head: Right, well, we got to wondering whether it was the same for religion. Do atheists “resist” stories with religious content, in the same way?
Ed: Well why would they? Isn’t the truth or falsity of religion more like the truth or falsity of physics, than of morality?
Head: I guess we thought it was the other way round. Anyway we assigned one of our newer hires to explore the idea, and at the staff meeting where he reported back he said that he didn’t experience any “imaginative resistance.”
Ed: Next topic—what was the most-read essay on Mostly Aesthetics this year? What’s the “greatest hit”?
Head: It was On Expertise, funnily enough, one of our least aesthetics-y essays. It’s even got some math in it.
Ed: Can you talk about the genesis of the piece?
Head: Sure, so we tell a story about Patrick Blackett, who led a group scientists/mathematicians working for the British government during World War II. There were “traditional” answers to strategic questions like, is it better to ship material across the Atlantic in a small number of large convoys, or a large number of small convoys? Blackett wanted, and winning the war depending on having, better, scientific answers; in the convoy case, his team were able to prove that larger is better. There’s supposed to be a moral about expertise here: Blackett’s group all had PhDs or whatever, but the math they used to answer these questions was rather elementary.
Someone on the staff learned the story from a book by the Cambridge University mathematician T. W. Körner called The Pleasures of Counting. Körner’s books are fascinating, as he tends to lure you, in the preface, with assurances that you don’t need all that much math to understand them, and then the symbols come flying. But the books are always also full of fascinating examples of hard and important real-world problems that the mathematics being discussed was used to solve. It’s a lesson in why stuff as daunting as, for example, Fourier Analysis, can be worth learning and mastering.
Ed: You told me over lunch the other day that there’s more great Blackett stuff in the book, that you couldn’t get into the essay. Are you planning to write more about him?
Head: Maybe...I mean, just to give one example, Blackett’s group also took up the question of the optimal service schedule for spitfires. You know, any machine will break down eventually, how often should it get a “tune up”? Your service station tells you, for your car, 3000 miles, but where does that number come from? Is it really best for your car, or does it just maximize their profits?
Ed: Which is it?
Head: Who knows! But Blackett found that, on the RAF’s then-current inspection schedule,
inspection tends to increase breakdowns and this can only be because it is doing positive harm by disturbing a reasonably satisfactory state of affairs.
Ed: Is there a lesson here for interventions in other areas—marriage, medicine, society at large?
Head: You’d need to pay us more to tackle that. There is another expertise-related lesson here, though: Blackett’s intensive data-driven investigation led him to...the well-known platitude, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Of course Blackett didn’t recommend stopping all preventative maintenance, just increasing the intervals between repairs.
Ed: How does the popularity of On Expertise compared to our all-time most read essay?
Head: Actually there’s a pretty big gap. Our “all-time greatest hit” is one of the old Lives of the Philosophers pieces, that humor column we used to run.
Ed: I don’t think I’ve actually read any of those.
Head: Yeah, they were the brainchild of the previous editor, who I think was actually sacked for commissioning them.
Ed: Okay, last question, what’s next for Mostly Aesthetics?
Head: Before answering, we should give a shout-out to our art team, whose excellent work is a side gig done on a shoestring budget. For this one, let’s turn the tables—best cover art this year, in your opinion?
Ed: I like the ones with a touch a humor. History Lessons, for example, where the art suited the content, a tongue-in-cheek poem. The Reign of Terror pieces were not funny, but the drawings of tortured and decapitated croissants were. Against Feet is an esoteric essay about theories of iambic pentameter, so I like the over-literal reading of the title used for the art.
Head: I also like the drummer on Poetry as Low-Grade Musical Material. Maybe you should give that kid a raise.
Ed: Back to the wrap-up question—what the future holds.
Head: Right, you’ve seen the office, it’s lousy with books people thought would inspire good essays, scattered on the floor or shoved into corners. What comes next depends on who trips over what on Monday morning. We’ve in the middle of running several poetry projects—American Independence in Verse, The Girls Who Went Away, and Poetica Philosophica—, there are more entries in those coming down the pipe. The intermittent series on freedom of expression will see more essays—we want to write something about Roger Williams. Last year we did a thing on Romanticism, next year we want to write more about Modernism, and its off-putting spiritual deadness. Otherwise, more Shakespeare, more poetic theory, Monty Python, history, Paul McCartney, Raymond Chandler, who knows!